The pool was whispering again.
“Odessa,” she heard. “Schenectady” Then, after a whole lot more she couldn't catch, very clearly, in a voice she recognised over the buzzing of the water, "unceremonious,” a word she wouldn't have picked up if she hadn't heard it on a previous occasion.
Unceremonious.
Mrs. Porter stood in the middle of her room and did not know which way to turn. Each time she came back to it, it was like a place she was stepping into for the first time. She recognised nothing.
When something like that happens over and over again it shakes you. As if you'd left no mark.
It wasn't simply that the moment she went out they slipped in and removed all trace of her. It was the room itself. It was so perfect it didn't need you. It certainly didn't need her.
She thought of breaking something. But what? A mirror would be bad luck.
She picked up a heavy glass ashtray, considered a moment, then flipped it out the window. Like that cockroach. It disappeared with a clunk into a flower bed.
Well, that was a start. She looked about for something else she could chuck out.
The one thing she couldn't get rid of was that Rock. It sat dead centre there in the window. Just dumped there throbbing in the late sunlight, and so red it hurt her eyes.
To save herself from having to look at it she shut herself in the bathroom. At least you could make an impression on that. You could use the lav or turn the shower on and make the place so steamy all the mirrors fogged up and the walls lost some of their terrible brightness.
The place had its dangers of course, but was safe enough if all you did was lower the toilet lid and sit. Only how long could a body just sit?
Unceremonious.
He had saved that up till the last moment, when he thought she was no longer listening, and had hissed it out, but so softly that if she hadn't had her head down trying to catch his last breath she mightn't have heard it at all.
What a thing to say. What a word to come up with!
She thought she might have got it wrong, but it wasn't a word she could have produced, she hardly knew what it meant. So what was it, an accusation? Even now, after so long, it made her furious.
To have that thrown at you! In a dingy little room in a place where the words were strange enough anyway, not to speak of the food, and the dim light bulbs, and the wobbly ironwork lift that shook the bones half out of you, and the smell of the bedding.
One of her bitterest memories of that dank little room was of Leonard kneeling on that last morning in front of the grate and putting what must have been the last of his strength into removing the dust of France from the cracks in his boots. His breath rasping with each pass of the cloth. His body leaning into the work as if his blessd soul depended on the quality of the shine.
And then, just minutes later, that word between them. “Unceremonious.”
For heaven's sake, what did they expect? How many meals did you have to dish up? How many sheets did you have to wash and peg out and fold and put away or smooth over and tuck under? How many times did you have to lick your thumb and test the iron? How many times did you have to go fishing with a safety pin in their pyjama bottoms to find a lost cord?
Angrily she ripped a page off the little notepad they provided on the table between the beds and scribbled the word. Let someone else deal with it, spelled out there in her round, state-school hand.
She opened a drawer and dropped it in. Unceremonious. Posted it to the dead.
Then quickly, one after another, scribbled more words, till she had a pile of ripped-out pages.
Dimension, she wrote.
Bon Ami.
Flat 2, 19 Hampstead Road, West End, she wrote.
Root, she wrote, and many more words, till she had emptied herself, like a woman who has done all her housework, swept the house, made the beds, got the washing on the line, and, with nothing to do now but wait for the kiddies to come home from school and her husband from work, can afford to have a bit of a lie-down. She posted each page in a different drawer until all the drawers were occupied, then stretched out on one of the beds, the one on the left, and slept. Badly.
Back home in her unit, dust would be gathering, settling grain by grain on all her things: on the top of the television, between the knots of her crocheted doilies, in the hearts of the blood-red artificial roses that filled the glass vase on her bedside table.
On one petal of each rose was a raindrop, as if a few spots of rain had fallen. But when you touched the drop it was hard, like one of those lumps of red-gold resin they used to chew when they were kids, that had bled out of the rough trunk of a gum.
If it was rain that had fallen, even a few spots, her things would be wet and the heart of the rose would have been washed clean. But what she found herself sitting in, in her dream, was a slow fall of dust. Everything, everything, was being covered and choked with it.
Well, it's what they'd always said: dust to dust — only she hadn't believed it. The last word. Dust.
It worried her now that when she'd made her list she had left it out, and now it had got into her head she'd never be rid of it. She'd just go on sitting there for ever watching it gather around her. Watching it fall grain by grain over her things, over her, like a grainy twilight that was the start of another sort of night, but one that would go on and on and never pass.
The Hoover, she shouted in her sleep. Get the Hoover.
She woke then. On this double bed in a room from which every bit of dust, so far as she could see, had been expunged.
And now, at last, the others arrived.
One of them lay down beside her. She refused to turn and look, and the bed was wide enough for her to ignore him, though at one point he began to whisper. More words.
The others, a couple, lay down on the second bed and began to make love, and so as not to see who it was who had come to her own bed, and most of all not to have to listen to his words, she turned towards them and watched. They were shadowy. Maybe black.
She didn't mind them using the bed, they didn't disturb her. Probably had nowhere to go, poor things. And they weren't noisy.
She must have gone back to sleep then, because when she woke again the room seemed lighter, less thick with breath. She was alone.
There was a humming in the room. Low. It made the veins in her forehead throb.
She got up and went, in her stockinged feet, to the window.
It was as if something out there at the end of the night was sending out gonglike vibrations that made the whole room hum and glow. The Rock, darkly veined and shimmering, was sitting like a cloud a hundred feet above the earth. Had simply risen up, ignoring the millions of tons it must weigh, and was stalled there on the horizon like an immense spacecraft, and the light it gave off was a sound with a voice at the centre of it, saying, Look at this. So, what do you reckon now?
Mrs. Porter looked at it askance, but she did look. And what she felt was an immediate and unaccountable happiness, as if the Rock's newfound lightness was catching. And she remembered something: a time when Donald had just begun to stand unsteadily on his own plump little legs and had discovered the joy of running away from her towards a flower he had glimpsed in a garden bed, or a puppy dog or his brother's red tricycle. When she called he would give a quick glance over his shoulder and run further. Suddenly unburdened, she had had to hang on to things — the sink, Leonard's Stelzner upright — so as not to go floating clean off the linoleum, as if, after so many months of carrying them, inside her body or on her hip, first the one, then the other, she had forgotten the trick of letting gravity alone hold her down.