Toxic – Clare Howdle
March 3rd, 2009 | Published in Volume IV: New Order
The TV flickers as I drive down into the valley. It always loses reception here – people going about their daily lives on screen jittering and fading. A brief break from the banality that rattles out day and night.
I look in my rear view mirror. Too eager, too early. She won’t have found me, not yet. It can take hours, sometimes, but it’s the best way, otherwise anyone could overhear us, could find out. And then where would she be? I shudder thinking about it.
I’m not even sure how I got here, not really. I’ve always been the sort of person who slips under the radar; not that it has bothered me – I’ve been content to stay out of it, close myself off so that things don’t affect me and I don’t affect things. Of course I felt the pain of those years as much as the next person, queuing for hours tightly gripping my ration book, tutting along with everyone else at how things got this far. Seeing the riots as the prisons overflowed, hearing about the boarding up of the hospitals, a nation too poor to pay for health care. Yes, I went on the marches and yes, I waved my banner. But not out of passion, rather as part of my continued attempt to blend in. To fit with everyone else. So yes, I voted when the time came and yes I celebrated with the rest of them when Reith came to power. It makes my throat itch when I think about it, how easily I fell for it all – that TV could be society’s salvation, it seems so ridiculous now. Now I know, now she has explained how ‘that mercenary sold our country as content, piece by piece’. But back then I didn’t care either way – all I knew was that thanks to him I could buy bread in the supermarket again and use as much electricity as I wanted. That was all that counted. Until I met Juliet.
My engine splutters a little as I head up the steep hill out of town.
—
It was a bitter February day, our first run-in, the sort that creeps under your skin and makes your bones cold. I was stood outside the office having a cigarette, while the giant television above my head twittered away; the blue glow from the screen animated the building opposite, brightness and shade. Pursing my lips I tried to blot out the relentless buzzing mixed with tinny electronic voices – it never stopped, that sound. Wherever you were, it never stopped. Without warning the crack of electricity and glass colliding exploded in my ears and sharp, stinging shards rained down around me. A couple of the shards caught my cheek, my hand, and droplets of red blood, my blood, fell on the ground.
It stung.
I could see from the remnants around me that the missile was just a beer bottle and so I started to scout around to see the arm that had hurled it. That’s when I saw her. Ducking behind the now lifeless building across the road: a dark haired woman, wrapped up against the penetrating cold, trying to keep out of sight.
I dropped my cigarette and ran across the road to see where she had gone. I wasn’t laying low, like usual and my blood was racing. She stood in the shadows, not hiding exactly, but guarded – a look of indignation on her face. Her sinewy body gave away her age. She had taught muscles in her neck covered by looser skin, wrinkles around her eyes, frownlines carved into her forehead. Her lips were bright red as if sore from the cold and her hair fell dark and damp around her face, tucked under a woollen hat. I was captivated. Her heavy breath, her demanding stare – eyes blazing with blood and glory.
I still hear her words when I close my eyes – as clear as that day, all husky and brilliant. An unconvincing, “Sorry,” followed by “wrong place, wrong time.”
But I knew it wasn’t the wrong place. The throbbing in my ears told me it wasn’t. The urge to find out why she had hurled the bottle told me it wasn’t. The muddle of admiration and fascination that I felt told me it wasn’t. Standing there I knew that it had been exactly the right place, under that screen, and exactly the right time, when the bottle hit.
So that’s how it started. I convinced her to tell me more and although reluctant at first, she seemed to warm to my eagerness. She gave me instructions, and I followed them to the letter. I had never felt so free. I ran to my car, choked it into action and drove to the McDonalds on the town’s outskirts. As I pulled in I looked in my mirror and saw the swift flash of headlights from the car parked by the entrance, her car. I watched it start up, turn right and head off down the street. Slowly, forcing myself to pause I counted to ten, then followed.
That evening was the only time I got see Juliet’s house. I was proud that she felt I was worth taking a risk on, opening herself up like that, for me. We pulled up on a patch of mud that looked like it used to be a lawn and she got out, stretched cat-like and then waved at me to get out too. I was so aware of her, the upward tilt of her head, proud and confrontational, the rhythm of her walk as she lilted from hip to hip, indoors. I ran my fingers through my hair, pinched my cheeks, and smoothed down my skirt. Embarrassed at my own clumsy movements I followed her inside.
The first thing I noticed was the quiet. No continuous drone coming from the walls, no flickering, no blue glow. She didn’t have any TVs. She clocked me looking and a wry smile spread across her face. “It makes me a better person,” was her explanation, something I have since written out and stuck above my kitchen sink, “without it I can think straight, can live.” And it certainly looked like she lived. In the absence of TVs, big prints of beautiful women stared out across the floor, confident, unapologising, brash. Books stood in piles; Flaubert, Woolf, Winterson, their covers bent and pages sticking out. A bright orange typewriter, must have been eighty years old at least, an ashtray with half a cigarette in it, a drained espresso cup. A tall pile of padded envelopes addressed with type-written labels and on the wall above them a map, with pins in it, a timetable with scrawled on post-it-notes stuck round the edges.
Looking through the doorway I could see a messy kitchen cluttered with pans, a bucket of rubber gloves, next to it a tub of what looked like metal filings. Old newspapers were stacked up on the table and empty plastic bottles lay in a bag on the floor. The smell of bleach, ammonia and something like nail varnish caught the hairs in my nostrils, burning the back of my throat as I breathed in deeply to get a better feel of her. She told me it was her work, how she fought back. That’s when she introduced herself as Juliet.
It turned out that Juliet wasn’t happy with how things had panned out, with the course of action Reith had taken to turn the country around. She poured tanine-rich wine into a chipped mug and passed it to me. We sat on the floor and talked. She said she saw something of herself in me, something of her fight. I blushed. I wished I was like her, opinionated, knowledgeable, individual. She explained about how she rebelled from the start, how she just couldn’t accept the way the Government did things. Her words made perfect sense.
It was late when I left. She lay curled up on the floor all talked out – a rosy glow in her cheeks from the wine. I have never been back. But I have seen Juliet. Every week. Like this. The elaborate drivearound for an hour or so of face time. But it’s worth it. She’s worth it.
—
We’ve been holding our late night rendez vous for months now, putting the world to rights. We talk about everything; where she grew up, why she rebelled, how she survived… every statement she makes is fuelled by the idea of change, disorder, rebellion. It wasn’t easy for her, going against the Institution. ‘Catching and trying enemies of the system makes great viewing, really gets the ratings up – there’s blood money to be made in the rebel’s cause’ she would spit out, disgusted.
The more we meet the more she says I’m like her, how she was when she was young, like a coiled spring – just waiting for the right opportunity to explode. And I suppose I am like that now I have met Juliet. She has shown me what it means to feel alive.
Sometimes, at the end of our meetings, she asks me to deliver letters for her. It’s the least I can do for the risk she puts herself through to meet with me. Tightly sealed with tape and glue, the envelopes look inviting, curious – with their hand-typed addresses, their weight. It doesn’t take me long to deliver them, not really. I am often going in the same direction anyway, or can find some business in that particular quarter to make the trip worthwhile. No-one ever notices my little Peugeot pull up by the side of the road, or me popping harmless envelopes through front doors. Not much, she tells me but something to show she’s still fighting. I’m just happy to be useful to her.
—
There it is. One flash, one fast flash and then a blinking orange offside light before her small white car turns off the road. My TV is tuned to our local Law Show, gasmasked policemen with distorted breathing wittering on about another terrorist attack in the city, politicians found dead in their homes, no suspects yet…. I flick the switch and the screen becomes black. Turning around, I head down the road where Juliet’s car went minutes before and pull up behind her. We run down the scree slope under the bypass where we can sit alone. She holds my hand as we run. My heart skips. We talk for hours, about how the world needs to change, and then she gives me another letter, tells me I am a good girl, a good little messenger that she can always rely on.
It stings.
—
So here I am again, in my car. Driving home from Juliet, the letter sat on the seat next to me, sealed side up, goading. The tears in my eyes are making it difficult to see and my head is aching with murky thoughts. Rebels can’t be relied on. Kicking back against the system isn’t about delivering post. I’m not just a messenger. I don’t want to contentedly be kept in the dark, to sit on the edge of this revolution. I don’t want to be with Juliet. I want to be like her. To be her.
So I pull over and stop the engine. I pick up the envelope, feeling it properly for the first time. It’s soft like jelly but with a strange resistance to it, like tightly packed snow. I hold it close to my face so I can see. I breathe.
I am Juliet.
With pounding blood and burning eyes I start to tear.