f i c t i o n a l

[metrocentric]

Eighteen years ago, on the day her father was arrested, Aine's mother bought her some Plasticine. That evening there were many adults downstairs in the front room when Aine opened the packet, peeled the multi-coloured corrugated bars from the plastic and each other, and tried to make shapes.

But the shapes wouldn't come. Within an hour she had worked the coloured material together into a ball, first streaked, then flecked, then a brownish-grey whole. The stuff had a sickly smell to her now and she put it in the drawer under her bed, but for days afterwards it remained with her, the odour of her mother crying and her father being gone.

Now Aine is in another country, sitting by a window in an apartment in a narrow block on a crowded hillside, chain-smoking Sobranies and waiting for her boyfriend to return home. She hears the ascending hum and descending hiss of the funicular and tries not to count each return journey.

Emile, so gentle with others, so privately brutal to himself. Sometimes Aine feels that these characteristics are linked, that if he could be a little rougher and less considerate to those around him then his self-inflicted punishment might be eased. Worse is when his confidence fails. She sees the flickers of uncertainty in his manner before even he is aware of it, and like a spasm it takes him. Aine sees danger in those episodes, but hasn't the facility, the role to intervene.

On Thursdays Emile buys flowers for the kitchen table. Before they faded he would photograph them. Prints of the results he kept in an album of their own. But recently he has attempted instead to paint the arrangement. It hasn't been a success, but unless Aine has missed it he hasn't been photographing them anymore either. Emile had approached capture of this week's bunch with a sense of urgency, discarding successive sheets of textured cartridge paper. He said the colours were never right.

Today, in the department store food hall, Aine has bought Emile a block of halva. Walking home she imagined him eating it with that milky tea of his. Now she curses her own presumption.

The funicular has stopped, the streetlamps have lit, the dinnertime noise of the other kitchens in the neighbourhood now rising. Cutlery and plates and television blare shouted down by gathered families. The small yellow evening bus appears briefly at the end of each street that Aine can see, climbing the hill in determined diagonals. With dusk, the air itself turned pink and violet. She turns the light on, but only to show to herself that she is really at home.

What it is about Emile's head, Aine doesn't know, but she likes to feel the hard skull, soft skin, thin flesh, blood pulsing just beneath, and the fuzz of his cropped hair. So much of him can be held like this between her palms. There's more, but right now this is all that she can think of.

When they first met, Aine had been the more troubled. Some nights, in sleep she screamed, even to her shame wet the bed. Emile changed the sheets for them and still he held her. Whereas her own troubles burst out, he experienced his as implosions, outward tremors of which she could barely feel.

It's quieter now and in the street below Aine sees a man pasting up posters, for the Left or the Right, the Regionalists or the Nationalists she can't tell which. It's only clear in this light that the lettering is too dark and stark to advertise a carnival or religious festival. In the distance, the buzz of scooters. A friend rings, she keeps the conversation short. When she hangs up there is no staccato tone to warn her of a missed call.

Sometimes, without cold climate or fever, Emile will shiver. The shaking, and a certain detachment about him at these times, resembles the symptoms of shock. He tells Aine, it's okay, it will pass soon. And it does.

There are no more cigarettes and at the back of Aine's throat a waxy taste. This afternoon, returning home, she had not been so concerned to find that every flower in the vase, petals and stem, had been painted a uniform cobalt blue. This seemed to her an unorthodox solution, but a means of moving on nonetheless. It was later finding the dish that served as Emile's palette which troubled her, to a physical extent, a feeling empty but weighted. Clearly he had prised his poster paints out of their tray, crushed them and mixed them in a little water. Aine had quickly put the dish in the sink, run the taps, washed it away. The grey sludge puddle had no colour at all.