Wrote this story a good while back and it was short listed in a Cootehill Arts Festival writing competition.
SHADOW DANCERS
She loved trees in winter. The gnarled blackened barks split down the middle. Siamese twins warring with each other. She saw dancers, warriors, tai-chi masters; gathering the stars, bowing to the moon. Shadow boxers, shadow puppets.
She
photographed these, dozens of them and hung them in her hallway. She painted
the walls in coconut twist- pale cream with a tinge of pink- and gave them up
to her shadow dancers.
Then
Michael asked her to give up her coconut twist bungalow and move into his
spacious flat overlooking the bay.
“It doesn’t
make sense. You’re always here anyway!” he argued.
“That’s not
true.”
“Mostly true?
“Sometimes
true.”
She liked
his huge bay window pouring sea light on his bed every morning. She liked his
high corniced ceiling, his cast iron fireplace with the Victorian tile inset.
She liked his steel sprung sofas and marble topped tables with carved mahogany
legs, his stone hot water bottle and his silver hand grinder. She revelled in
the wine- reds and night-sky blues of his Kashmir
rugs and the smell of dust that clung to his heavy window drapes. But most of
all she loved his frayed wallpaper where cupids and shepherdesses disported
themselves recklessly on some Elysian plain.
Her shadow
dancers could not compete with these Grecian foibles. They needed a blank space
on which to sketch their stark poses. She wondered how long Michael would allow
this glorious revelry to continue. He didn’t seem to notice their state of
disrepair and disarray. And that was the problem. Michael didn’t seem to notice
anything.
He would happily
hang her shadow dancers on these walls and not see how ugly their choreographed
limbs would look set against the pastoral anarchy that reigned here. Michael
did not notice such things.
He did not
know when her stillness needed to be stirred. He caught none of her shifts in
mood and she could find none in him. She found his will to complacency a lump
of unleavened dough between her fingers, and knead as she would, she was unable
to make it yield to her touch. There was no yeast in it. She decided to cover
the dough and leave it and hope that it might prove.
And still
he asked her to give up her coconut twist walls and still she could not explain
and then it happened.
She
returned home one day to find a gin bottle in the middle of the floor and the DVD
player pulled out of its niche. Her wardrobe had been ransacked. Her favourite
coat, a shabby Avoca tweed, her beloved Canon camera and her shadow dancers
were gone. In disbelief she scoured the hedges, gardens and laneways in search
of them.
“They
must have been disturbed,” pronounced Sergeant Doyle. “They usually take the
electricals. A tweed coat? That’ll be to wrap up the booty. And were the pictures
valuable?”
Valuable?
Margaret thought about the word. Latin in origin? Valuare, valuatum. She
couldn’t remember.
“No. Yes. I
mean to me.”
“Are you
sure they didn’t take cheques from your cheque book? They remove them from the
back so that you won’t notice.”
“No.
They’re all there.”
“And the
camera?”
“I liked it
a lot. It takes time to get to know a camera. Like a relationship.” On seeing his
blank expression she added, “It was a Canon. I’d have to look up the model
number.”
“And its
value?”
“I’ve had
it a while.”
“The
insurance company will need a statement with figures and model numbers.
You wouldn’t
think of getting an alarm system?”
Alarm bells
punctuating the night silence, disturbed by a breeze or a wrong sequence
entered after a late night out. No she wouldn’t consider it.
She wrote poems about the burglary and read
them to her creative writing group. The words looted , plundered and violated
figured a lot. Someone asked her if she’d been raped. Margaret was stunned into
a silence that could not be stirred.
She sat on her haunches in corners of the
house and never went out. She took sick leave from work. She dreamt of a house
with no doors, an open skied cylinder leaking rain on its heirlooms. She woke up
sobbing, her whole body aching with the pain of something that felt like loss.
She developed a chest infection that would not clear.
Michael
bought her a new camera which she wrapped in a woollen jumper and stowed under the bed for safe keeping. He watched her
lying inert for hours, unresponsive and silent. He lay beside her at night
waiting for the moment when she would waken, choking on her dreams. He watched
the silent tears that streaked her hair grey overnight.
She threw
away her bohemian attire, her scalloped edged jumpers, her sequinced cottons
reeking of sandalwood. She wore polo neck acrylics and polyester trousers in
shades of grey and brown. Michael gave up his sunlit-frayed shepherdesses and
moved into the coconut twist bungalow in suburbia. Margaret went back to work.
She stood
in front of a group of Second Years, every muscle in her body taut, her teeth
clenched, trying to hold their concentration in this jug that was the class
room; knowing that at any moment the jug would spill over or even crack.
“Miss, Can
somebody open a window, I’m roastin’!”
“But it’s
freezin’ Miss!”
“There’s a
wasp in your hair, Sarah Casey!”
“Oh Miss!”
And she
watched the liquid rise in the jug and dribble all over the floor.
She was
aware of the profile of the Deputy Principal in the glass panel on her left,
always patrolling the corridor for just such leaks. The thought of shadow
dancers flitted and vanished.
“Now that’s
enough girls,” she said quietly, too quietly.
If she was
lucky the bell would ring. Books would shut, catapult into desks. Lids would
slam, desks scrape and a flurry of girls would squeeze themselves through the
doorway and expand into the corridor.
The
Principal was glad to get rid of her.
Michael now
did all the cooking and cleaning and washing. He weeded the garden and planted
spring bulbs. All winter the new camera lay in its nest of wool beneath the bed
and still Margaret mourned. She watched triangles of light brighten at
intervals the neighbour’s gable wall. She watched the dying fuchsia boxing with
the wind and thought to write a poem. She watched Michael come and go. It was
like the time she had broken her arm and was untouchable. They watched each
other now through this barrier of a broken arm’s length and waited.
A kitten
circling the tall stalks of spring daffodils caught her unawares. It may have
been his shade of tortoise shell or the pose in with which he gathered himself
for pounce. She reached for the camera, fumbled with the unfamiliar dials, her
mind dazed with the possibilities. She pressed a button and the thing sprang
into action.
“There’s a
handbook to go with it,” he said from the doorway. And looking at his face a
knowing stirred in her.
She knew
that the dough had been left to prove for long enough and she stretched out her
arm towards him.
Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2017
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