Verbal Magazine

Threads

Michael is on the brink of saying something. It’s been building and building up all year, and last night in the pub he put his hand on my knee, leaned towards me with a serious look and said my name. But then he got distracted by one of his drunk friends and he didn’t say what he was going to.

We’re living together, Michael and I, in one of those old, red-brick houses at the edge of Jericho near the meadow. I didn’t know Michael before I moved in, didn’t know anything about Jericho or Oxford. I organised my accommodation from Dublin.
‘If your housemate’s a heroin dealer, you’ll have to move out,’ my sister Pauline said.
‘Obviously,’ I said.
Michael is not a dealer. He’s studying philosophy at the University. It’s possible that things haven’t happened between us because he is in his final year and doesn’t want to get distracted. He’s in the library a lot. I’m in the first year of my course at Brookes. Michael keeps telling me not to study so much. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ he says.
It’s Saturday and I’m upstairs in my room trying to study. Michael is out somewhere. It’s April but it’s still chilly so I have the blow heater going in my room. The sound of it is lulling me into a kind of trance. I end up staring at the quotation I have pinned on the wall over my desk:

Negative Capability … is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.—Keats

It is a good quotation, though I’m not sure I totally get it.
I stand up and turn my back on my desk. On my bed there is a box of Persil tablets, a bicycle pump, a pair of gloves and a copy of A Room with a View. I push everything against the wall and lie on the bed.
The main reason I can’t study is Michael. I think about calling Pauline to tell her about what he nearly said last night, but then I decide not to. In my head Pauline’s voice already says, ‘But how do you know he was going to say anything significant? He might have been asking you if you wanted another drink.’
Pauline got to meet Michael when she visited me for a few days last weekend. She was impressed that Michael immediately offered her his bed while she was staying with us, saying he would sleep on the couch. I think that is why she didn’t ask him straight out why on earth he was studying philosophy (Pauline is very factual).
I had long discussions with Pauline about Michael when she was here. Lying here on my bed, I think about stuff Pauline said to me about Michael. She definitely knows how to make a point. She was brilliant at debating at school. But I know she doesn’t understand when I tell her about the feeling I get when Michael’s eyes catch mine. It’s not just me – it’s a connection. She doesn’t get it that when I talk to him, even about the dullest things, it’s actually exciting, like we’re spinning gold out of straw.
I know she’s my older sister and has more experience and so on, but I just have this feeling about Michael. And I think he will ask me out or do something soon. 
When she was here, I told Pauline about the times Michael and I go to the Jericho Café, just the two of us, and sit downstairs with coffee and talk for hours. He smokes roll-ups and the sun coming through the small window behind his head makes the smoke look as if it’s solidifying, like the stuff coming from the lamp just before the genie appears.
Pauline said that I get too caught up in my own internal monologues to care much for reality, that I’m still like a teenage novel babbling on about this and that in my head. She’s the only person who knows that after I read The Catcher in the Rye I had conversations in my head with Holden Caulfield for years afterwards.
‘He’s a moron,’ I would say about someone I’d met.
‘He’s a goddamn moran,’ Holden would agree.
Of course, I don’t do that anymore. And anyway my conversations with Michael are real, not imaginary.
Pauline and I took the walk across the meadow to The Trout and I told her about going on the same walk a couple of weeks earlier with Michael and his friends. He asked me to come and we talked only to each other the whole way there and back.
‘He was just being kind,’ Pauline said. ‘You didn’t know any of his friends.’
But our pace had been quicker and put distance between us and the others. Once, when we had stopped among trees to wait for them to catch up, I thought he might kiss me. But he started talking about birds instead. There was a wren on the fence by my shoulder.
‘Don’t move,’ he said. And the bird flew away at the sound of his voice.
I thought he had seemed tired and quiet on the rest of the journey back home, and I wondered if he was awkward about stuff like this.
Pauline said, ‘Michael doesn’t strike me as being that shy.’
Then I brought up the girl Michael had liked before Christmas.
‘What about her?’ Pauline asked.
I told Pauline that the girl had her eye on Michael’s friend. That had to hurt. It would teach anyone to be cautious.
‘There are threads in your head,’ Pauline said. ‘Instead of letting them be, you’ve pulled them together and knitted a jumper from them.’
Then, later, when we were having a drink in The Trout, Pauline said, completely out of the blue, ‘How would you feel if Michael actually asked you out? Would you be happy?’
‘Of course!’ I said.
‘I’m not sure,’ Pauline said. ‘I just don’t think …

Downstairs, the front door opens. Michael’s home. He seems to be wrestling with plastic bags in the hall and a door closes. I get off my bed and look at myself in the mirror.
‘If you’re so sure about how he feels’, Pauline said on the last day of her visit, when she got frustrated with me, ‘why haven’t you made a move?’
There are lots of reasons why, such as I’m not actually sure in the way you can be about blue and red paint making purple or that breathing keeps you alive. But also, and I didn’t tell Pauline this as she would hate it, isn’t it better when the man makes the first move?
‘I think you prefer wondering to reality,’ Pauline commented.
It is possible that Pauline is right about that. But isn’t it natural to sometimes prefer to wonder?
Still staring at myself in the mirror, it suddenly strikes me as ridiculous that I just accept Michael should be the one to say something. Aren’t you a kind of half-person if you prefer uncertainty to taking your life into your own hands? What if I love him body and soul and don’t say it, like Lucy Honeychurch? I might always regret it. I might look back on these days and wonder what might have happened.
So, I think, what about now? If I am serious about saying something to Michael, then what about now? At least if I do it straightaway, I won’t have time to think about it. If I go downstairs now and just come out with it, isn’t that the best way?
I am suddenly intensely nervous. I feel almost sick. I pull the brush through my hair and it crackles, some stray hairs floating out and rising upwards. I think I should change my jumper. But instead I pull it down and do some feverish pecking at the bobbles along the side.
I open the sitting-room door and walk in. It feels like he’s in the room, but he’s not. On the coffee table there is a copy of Being and Time by Martin Heidegger lying open on its belly. There’s an almost-stubbed-out cigarette in the ash-tray. I have a quick look out the window to see if he’s in the back garden, but he’s not. I sit down on the couch and listen for any sounds of him in the house.
I don’t know whether it is the silent house, the feeling of him having been very recently here and now gone, the lonely thread of smoke rising from the ashtray, but I suddenly feel kind of empty. I think of something else Pauline said before she went back to Dublin. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I know it’s hard to take, but it’s what people do that’s important, not the impressions they give.’
I pick up Being and Time and flick through it, not really taking anything in. I try to think of something worse than telling Michael how I feel, like being told I have a terminal disease, to make myself ashamed for being so nervous.
Michael has notes scribbled in the margins of Being and Time in blue felt-tip pen. Across the top of one page he has written what looks like a phone number. It’s Pauline’s mobile number. I remember that he took her number one day when she was visiting and he wanted to meet up with us in the evening. He said that sometimes I don’t hear my phone, so he would take her number just in case. But the strange feeling of seeing Pauline’s number written on top of page 58 of his book doesn’t go away.
I come back again to what Michael might have been trying to say to me last night in the pub before he was interrupted by his friends. His friends were all asking me about Pauline. Was she single? When was she coming over again? I was kind of flattered by their interest in her. But now I have an image of being surrounded by their faces, all leering at me, like circus freaks. Michael’s face is in the circle.
I can’t remember everything; we were all a bit drunk. Michael put his hand on my knee and his face was flushed and intense. He mumbled something that sounded like my name, ‘Elaine …’ But now I wonder was he was actually saying ‘Pauline…’
Perhaps Michael likes Pauline. This is a new and horrible thought.
The phone rings in the front hallway. It’s Pauline.
‘Have you thought about what I said?’ She says.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘I know it’s hard when you have an obsession. But he’s just a normal lad. I’m sure his room just smells like old socks, for crying out loud.’ She expects me to laugh but I don’t.
Suddenly I hear Michael’s voice outside. His shape emerges in the stained glass of the front door.
‘I have to go,’ I say, hanging up. I make a run for it up the stairs.
I’m in my room when he comes into the hallway, laughing down his phone. ‘No,’ he says to whoever he is talking to, ‘Don’t tell me. I’m sure if I tried, I’d guess. Yeah … yeah … but I wonder if …’ His voice becomes muffled as he goes into the sitting room and closes the door.

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