Bears

This day just won’t end. The last half an hour has taken at least twice that long and the computer screen won’t stop silently screaming the work out at me. I’m tempted to try and sneak out early, trying to avoid the supervisor subtly without drawing attention to myself and then out the emergency exit and home. I had it all mapped out in my mind but in the end I didn’t do it. I’d be seen surely, the super like a bloodhound in his ability to sniff out dissent with his droopy nose and paunchy face. He wouldn’t pull out of his marked spot till five to five on the button peering over the dashboard snootily at the ground he considered well below him, washing any errant flecks of dirt from the underside of the car as soon as he arrived home. Not a hope of making it out past him.

The clock, again, five minutes? Oh God. This place must be built on a black hole or something, this is ridiculous. The warmth has built up throughout the day and it’s getting drowsy, shirt and tie gone limp with the sticky heat. I hadn’t even wanted to do this job, and now I was stuck, feet glooping through the mire of the working week. In an impersonal office I have one little piece of home, a little scribbled part stuck awkwardly to the cubicle wall that seems to have taken a dislike to the picture and dislodges it every time I look away. My eyes were resting on it now and it does make me smile tiredly for a little. She really was terrible at drawing, but I suppose social services would be after me if I told her that, so instead I stuck it proudly to the cubicle wall and turned to it every few minutes of my day. A little brown smudge with four little spindly legs and a bigger brown smudge beside it. She was annoyed when I asked what it was, “Daddy, it’s me and you!” Oh of course, how obvious now. “It’s me pushing you across a river!” She had taken her baby nickname of bear to heart as soon as she was old enough to understand it, and openly referred to her and myself as bear. I couldn’t help murmuring a smile while asking “Do you think you’d be strong enough for that?” and dropping her onto her bed carefully. She was gurgling laughter under the covers as I turned the lights off and whispered her to sleep quietly, leaving the door open a little as she liked it.

It really had been a mixed blessing at the time. I would say a seventy-thirty mix in favour of debilitating horror for the first while, but I soon levelled myself out. In the middle of a shaky relationship with every day blooming and flowering and crumbling to grey this little sprout of life made her way somehow. I don’t quite know how, me and her mother weren’t getting on at the time and spending less and less time together as we spiralled apart. We were brought slamming together though with a doctor’s office and test results, looking at each other scared and wide eyed and what were we going to do? The walk back to the car was silent, and we didn’t say a word for half an hour sat looking through the dirty windscreen.

That had been three years ago and they had made it through without thinking. No thought spent on what job to choose, wildly grateful for the chance to spend forty hours a week earning. They hadn’t had a minute to think, that’s what kept them together for the few years past. The realisation had come in the first quite night they had together. Usually kept awake and sleeping in anxious bursts, they were undeniably a help to one another. In the slow silence that settles after three years of interrupted sleep it’s just the two of them lying there in the half light and she’s smiling slightly, him nearly too shy to ask. She was thinking about "when we were younger actually, and you used to put on that voice to make me laugh d’you remember?" He groaned smiling in recognition and they giggled exhaustedly with her looking so delicate in the light. Wafting over to the lightswitch she closes the rooms eyes into darkness and climbs blindly back into bed with a softly murmured “Night Honey”

The morning opened his eyes with her light and he found her embedded in his arms curled asleep, and he stayed there for a little while waiting for her to wake up. This became the normal routine and after a while he found it hard to sleep when she was working late and he was alone in the silent bed, waiting for her returning click of the door. Routine settled, routine lined their lives and time rubbed the rough edges off and rolled smoothly along unnoticed while life shouted around every corner.

As the winter closed in and the outside world shrunk back behind a veil of rain and heavy nighttime darkness they were blanketed together in the house. The power would go intermittently and they would sit in the dark until the house was sparked to light again. These passing wet evenings were unsettled. Drawing cheekily closer to her under darkness’ cover she would slowly squirm away, and as soon as the light made it’s halting entrance she was into the kitchen with offers of tea.

These things were fraying the little edges that take a long time to notice, building up incessantly until someone just had to say something. They were having the odd harsh word when he would come back thin skinned from work and her face would be steaming red from the cooker. It didn’t happen often but when it did…

I was dying for five all day but as it drew closer I began to feel an unsummoned lurch in my stomach, knowing the thin, icy atmosphere that was waiting to crack at home. We had argued the night before, sparked by me doing what I always do apparently, and she had told me about this before. I was always leaving my wet towels on the floor and you know how I hate that, working herself into a steam. I was just too tired. Too emaciated and brittle for it and I crackled her attention with some sharp words that she really didn’t like. It ended with raised voices reigned in under the hope that Belle wouldn’t hear, but we still made noise, God it was horrible.

So today as I crammed my face in between elbows and backs on the bus I really wasn’t in the best of moods. This wasn’t helped by the old dear’s umbrella that had taken an amorous attraction to my behind, bumping it continuously despite my glared reproachs. Opening the door laboriously and hanging my coat in the dark hall is enough to let her know I’m here, and she meets me in the middle of the kitchen. She really seems worked up, must have taken some time to prepare herself for this. Calm before the storm, wait for it… A deflating “Can we talk?” is all she offers, followed by a chair and an imploring look. This must have taken a lot of thought out of her and even in the dim light of the kitchen I can see every word has sweated to her brow throughout the day, she looks pale. “If it’s the towels again I’ve told you, I’ll stop it OK?” It’s not that, she reassures, I want to talk about something. The real reason for her recent tetchiness and snap answers is about to be revealed I think.

It’s becoming heavily ominous in the little kitchen and I’m not liking it one little bit, not one iota. Jaw clenched and an unwavering please listen look from across the short span of the table she sits there unmoving. With a hand raised to brush back a hair she crumbles suddenly and I instantly feel for her, looking completely defenceless and tender as she does. The words are mushed with her tears as she sniffles the tale. It happened years ago but I have to tell you now before it finally stops my heart with worry. I havn’t told anyone this so I’ve no idea where to start.

It began nonetheless in a stormy departure from our apartment five years earlier, a regular occurrence in the turbulent atmosphere the two of us were sharing at the time. She had slapped the pavements for a while until she found a brightly lit bar, decided to go in and ended up getting angrily, roaring drunk. The place had mirrors everywhere, she remembered that vividly for some reason, and at some stage of the night her increasingly blurred reflection was joined by another. Brown hair, tall, I don’t really remember what he was like ok? Well anyway, they got talking and… I stopped her. I’d heard this one before, definitely in some situation that progresses with the words “one thing led to another” and ends with someone decimated. I couldn’t stand hearing her say it, I knew she would do it just like that as well, she never had much of an imagination..

We had never been a model couple and we had to coax this faltering family along every day, but we had stayed true to each other I had thought. It was what kept us insulated against the world that threatened to overwhelm us every day, just the three of us bonded unchangeably together by blood. She can see how the news has hit me, I’m nearly gone transparent with shock and I can’t really focus my words onto anything in particular, hovering around “Well eh” and “How did…?”

She’s not finished though. I get the feeling that if she doesn’t get the words out now they’ll swell in her throat and she’ll be struck dumb. It was a few months before Belle was born and well…How many months? She breaks finally with her tears gushing and tearing down the machinery for words and flooding her eyes. I didn’t, no couldn’t hear any more, I had to get out of the room with her crying maniacally beside me and lamenting like stories of terrible deeds. I collapsed ghost eyed into the couch of the sitting room, sat rigidly staring at the opposite wall that has been drained of colour. Speechless, absolutely speechless.

The clock on the wall has long since stopped but I would wager a good hour was spent in immobile silence, thoughts arising and linking and mounting in his mind all the time he sat. She didn’t come near him, he could hear her snuffled sobs from the kitchen as he tried to balance his thoughts, tipping between anger and a slithering feeling of loss.

His mind couldn’t keep up with these frantic thoughts anymore, he has to sleep or stop thinking for a while at least. The stairs creak and groan, seeming compassionate in the dark until he reaches the landing. Her door is closed shut, always by her mother unthinkingly. Cracking the dark with a blade of light from the opened door she turns to fuzzily make out the shape in the door. I could leave and nothing would tie me here at all, no blood or promises or obligations anymore so I would just go and start it all again fresh. I was turning away from the door for a last time when my ear was hooked by a “Daddy, is that you?” I took a step, and another, but found I was back at the door. “Yeah, are you alright?” She raises her head all tussled and gives me a sleepy grinned “Just checking” and turns over to sleep again. I suppose I’d better go downstairs, long night in store I feel.

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