The Intruder
I wrote this a little while ago. I will be hard on myself and say I don’t particularly care much for this story anymore, as in, it isn’t the sort of story I care to write these days, but at the time of writing it it had come from an honest place and I was doing the best I could! Ha ha.
The Intruder
The door opens with a moan. Sophia climbs the two flights of stairs in the dark. She feels her way along the walls not because she’s drunk but because tonight the stairs feel unfamiliar. A weight pushes against her that isn’t the weight of alcohol but of something else. Her body fills with want and dread and confusion.
The floor creaks when she passes the kitchen and it creaks again when she passes Blake’s bedroom. His door is closed. Back when they last were lovers, Blake slept with his door open. He would leave his door open for Sophia and she would leave her boots outside his room and close the door behind her. But tonight his door is closed and Sophia thinks this might or might not mean he is sleeping alone.
When she reaches the lounge room she removes her boots. The carpet feels familiar because Blake and Sophia had once, twice, thrice, made love there. They loved to devour each other in communal spaces. Sometimes after making love, when Blake would go out for a smoke or a shower or to grab another beer, Sophia would squirt perfume over these spaces.
As she gropes in the darkness to find the couch she discovers a new installation – a mattress leaning against the wall. It smells like an old factory. Her shin hits a hard edge of the couch and Sophia falls into it. She buries her face into the cushions and the room spins. A gravity, a force, is stretching her body across the room. The smell of cigarettes on her hands and her damp hair smells of him. A smell she ordinarily despised but had grown to enjoy over time.
She thinks if she could just be a piece of furniture, disguised amongst the couches and the coffee table and the bookshelf and the television, she can make it through the night. If she could just be left alone in there until the morning, if he could just leave her alone for good. The room spins and the planet that is Blake and his bedroom only two rooms away, pulls her body.
She covers her whole body with the blanket from the couch. She notices that it is his blanket. She wraps it around herself and closes her eyes.
When she wakes the next morning the lounge room is bright. She is wet with sweat. She can almost smell sex on the cushions but it might be her imagination. Might be the mattress against the wall. She pulls the blanket from her body and looks around. All she can hear is the traffic outside. It’s nine am.
She pours the blanket back over her shoulders and creeps out of the lounge room. Nobody is in sight. She puts her boots on and the floor creaks as she passes Blake’s room and then again when she reaches the kitchen. She sees a woman’s body open the fridge and retrieve a carton of milk.
‘Oh, hey,’ says the woman. A housemate. She holds a mug in the air and smiles to Sophia. ‘Coffee?’
‘No, thanks,’ says Sophia, smiling a reflexive smile. Her head aches. She pours herself a glass of water without thinking.
‘I have to get to work,’ says the woman to nobody in particular. Then she says, ‘I’m sorry,’ and turns to Sophia suddenly. ‘I’m Jane. What’s your name?’
‘Amanda,’ she says.
‘Nice to meet you,’ says Jane, dropping a splash of milk into her steaming mug. She leaves the carton on the bench. ‘Help yourself to some coffee if you like. It’s only instant, but the water’s boiled.’ She smiles again at Sophia, throws a large bag over one shoulder and blows into her coffee as she leaves.
When the front door slams shut, Sophia finishes her water and drapes the blanket over the back of a chair in the kitchen. Footsteps and two creaks echo behind her as she opens Blake’s bedroom door.
Everything is still. A new painting hangs on the wall. His bed is now a loft bed with a desk underneath. Clothes are draped over various ends of furniture.
The first night she had been there the room was doused in red light. She drank beer from a bottle, and Blake had asked her what music she’d like to hear. She cringes at a memory of uttering, ‘something the colour of red,’ but he’d turned to her without any expression and said he knew exactly what she meant.
And to Sophia it seemed he did. The music flushed through the room in red ribbons, soft and rich and complete. The violins streamed over her body and down her thighs. He bit her lip. He threw her against the wall and tore her skirt.
She closes the door behind her. She sits on the floor and runs her hand up and down the wooden leg of the bed. She wonders what it would be like to fuck him on this bed now, so close to the ceiling. She stands up and looks in the mirror. There are fingerprint smudges on the glass. His or somebody else’s. She picks up his cologne and smells it, then puts it back down. She opens a drawer in his desk and spreads her palm across an array of trivial objects – buttons, paper clips, pens, cigarette lighters, re-sealable bags. The second drawer she opens contains notebooks, condoms, underwear, old metcards, and an address book. She flicks to ‘S’ and reads her phone number. She picks up a photo from his desk of him and his nephew, a photo he had showed her once that she liked. Then she puts it back.
His rubbish bin is full of empty cans of his favourite brand of beer, and on his bookshelf are empty bottles of some other drink entirely. His or somebody else’s.
Sophia runs her fingertips along the small collection of books that collapse against each other behind the bottles. One of the books belongs to her. She pulls it out and thumbs through it. The dog-ears she once created are still in tact. She closes the book and puts it back on the shelf.
Something about the stillness of the room bothers her. She moves to the door and flicks the light switch. Regular yellow light spills over his things, illuminating them in a new shade. Dust particles float before the window and she looks outside.
The traffic still purrs. A tram pulls up and stops – the same tram she used to catch at strange hours to see him. People her age wearing similar clothes step down onto the road and walk to the footpaths.
How unusual this seems to her now. And what a strange and complicated thing is intimacy. She looks down at the carpet and sees a cigarette lighter that says HORIZON. She picks it up. Rust has accumulated around the switch, and it doesn’t work every time she tries to work it. She puts the lighter in her pocket, closes his desk drawers, and, at the same time, turns off his light and opens his door.
imagineering
Ideas often flash across our minds more complete than we could make them after much labour…!
You write with steely tenderness, human enthusiast…
thepalms
Thank-you :)
And for the record, I’ve never gone snooping through an ex-lover’s shit before. Although I’ve very much fantasised about it.