Justine

Being, in fact, chapter seven of Dead City

I ended up wandering down to the cinema and spending the night in front of a film screen. As I walked out I had a throbbing head and I decided to take in the cool fresh air of morning, despite the inherent risks of being outside with people. I had that heavy feeling all over my body, and a sickness in the heart. I had packed a book into my bag with the intention of reading it by the river, but I wanted to be inside so I headed towards the centre of town to find a place to read it.

It had been a long time since I had these requirements, but after a while of looking I came upon a place that seemed suitable: a little Greek cafe with a long window across the street-face. This would normally upset something in me, but the day was pleasant and the snows appeared to have been forgotten.

I set myself at the back of the café, where the protagonists of light fiction always go, and took out my book. It was a crime novel, the hard-boiled kind, which I had been trying to read for years. Any other book I could devour, and I ran through them all with ease once I stopped sleeping, I got through them in no time. But this one, I just got nowhere. I managed to read the first two pages, I knew the first two by heart, but the rest I had no idea about.

No sooner had I made my way through the familiar first pages than a cool breeze swept my face. I quickly looked up from my book to see who entered, expecting another ghoul. Yet I saw no ghoul, but instead a kind-faced girl. She breezed into the room as if it was hers and hers alone. So many ghouls had passed through while I sat in that corner, and none held any interest to me, and yet this woman was something entirely different; something special. The book dropped from my hand unnoticed as I watched her sit and order a coffee, even in the busy room I could hear a sweet timbre in her voice.

A couple of other men noted her entry, this I could see, and immediately I was gripped by a jealousy I had no right to feel.

She was perhaps nineteen or twenty, at my best estimate. I figured her a student, she dressed that way; she lacked the jaded air that many graduates felt. However, in my analysis my eyes lingered a moment too long. As she surveyed the room over the brim of her coffee cup she caught me looking her way. Where a normal man may kindly have smiled and looked away, I pulled my gaze away suddenly and so made plain my guilt. Mortified, I continued to avert my gaze, trying to hide my shame.

To my surprise, she greeted me with a smile as she stood over the chair opposite me, looking at me with a candour I found embarrassing, as if she was deciding to what use I could be put.

She placed her cup and saucer on the table and threw her jacket over the back of the chair. She didn’t ask permission to sit with me, she just did, as if it was her right. I liked that. Settling into her seat she returned my stare with an amused smile. “You really do stare, don’t you?”

Her voice possessed a slight accent to it that I could not place, either from the North, or the Continent. It was sweet though, like an exotic quartet in my ears, a voice dipped in foreign honey. She looked at my book and shook her head, and then she smiled once more. I had no idea what I should have been doing, what I should have said, it was far from the norm for a girl to approach me in such a fashion.

“Not much of a talker, are you?”

I was brought back from a wealth of strange worlds revolving around her smile. “No, I’m sorry, I can’t say I am.”

She was all smiles again. “That’s alright, we can’t all be talkers. A conversation only really needs one talker in it, anyway. It’s your lucky day, it so happens that I am a talker.” she stopped to quickly sip her coffee, look around, and then leant over to me as if she was sharing a deep secret — “isn’t that fortunate?”

I took a long sip of my tea. “Very,” I croaked.

Maybe she’s just a lunatic, I thought. There have always been plenty to go around: dishevelled vagabonds that became too familiar with alcohol and the city streets. Her accent might have betrayed her as a refugee that had wandered in for a coffee from coppers she had collected juggling on the corner.

Her clothes, however, suggested otherwise. She wore a charming orange blouse that caught the light awkwardly, under which I could see the faint shadow of her bra. She had on tight jeans also, and shoes that looked expensive. What’s more, her fingers and wrists were laden with jewellery, with rings on every finger and on her middle finger on her left hand she wore three. Besides, she had no juggling apparatus from what I could see.

She saw me eying her trinkets and began to fiddle with them. “They’re gifts from my father, all of them,” she said. “He isn’t, like, you know, around much, but whenever he sees me he gives me a new ring.”

I expressed my condolences for her father’s absence, but she gave me no space, speaking again and pointing to each in turn. “This one’s from Morocco, and this one he bought at a market in China, I don’t know about this one, he never would tell me where he went for this one.

“He travels a lot, like, you know, finding himself and all that, I don’t know where he thinks he lost himself, but he’s never been to these places before so I’m not sure how he might find himself there, when you lose something you always look in the last place you had it, right? Just seems like an excuse for escapism to me.”

Her logic was unassailable. I uttered a short agreement before she was off again. She spoke quickly and without pause, as if she had been holding in this information so long that she was like to burst had she not come upon me. Free at last to speak, it flooded out in unbridled prose that oozed passion, sadness, and humour all at once.

I barely heard what she said, her words simply sounded like music to me and I was captivated by the tune and not the lyrics. All I could do was admire this woman before me. Her long dark hair and her upright posture — a stance that smacked of a strict upbringing — this heavenly creature that chose me, of all the men in the room, as her partner for the afternoon.

Fascinated was she by the world around her, like a girl fresh out of the convent. She took breaks in her talking to sip her coffee and steal glances around the faces in the room. Everything immediately around her she was compelled to touch, it seemed; gripped by a tactile connection to her world, as if by not touching something she might miss out on something critically important in its composition. It was not a careless, inappropriate compulsion, but a considered, careful examination of her environment. She was surely unaware of it and I was not about to point it out to her, especially when she reached out across the table to caress my hand.

She talked and talked and talked and I didn’t care. Perhaps I was not the centre of her world in that moment, that position was reserved for her; or perhaps I was just a better listener than I thought. The way she spoke about herself, about the world, it seemed she had needed to talk for a long time, longer than she could cope with. For the first time in my life a woman was not treating me with a cold detachment, and while I felt like I should cut in with some manner of observation or vocalise some form of agreement, I was not about to ruin the privilege of just hearing her talk.

Out of nowhere she laughed, as if someone had just whispered the world’s funniest joke in her ear. Wholly it caught me off guard as she wrinkled up her nose and laughed with such candour, so lightly and carelessly, that immediately I decided to love her. In that moment she turned my world upside-down and all my demons and hauntings, so dark and terrible, came tumbling out into the world around me without me realising. Too distracted was I by her utterly lovely countenance.

The room grew silent for a moment and we sat opposite each other, staring into each other’s eyes. “Tell me,” she said after a while to break the silence. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

I told her I didn’t and she seemed disappointed. “Men always say that, and there’s always someone they’re hiding away. They’re cheats. Are you being honest or are you a cheat?”

I told her it was the truth and that it had been more than a year since my last steady relationship. She seemed amused by this. “I have my amorous moments,” I said in my defence.

“Do you?” she said, a mocking smile spreading across her face.

“Well, I’ve had my amorous moments,” I rephrased. “I don’t have them anymore.”

She scrutinised me for a moment, as if she was deciding whether to purchase a pair of shoes. “You have a strange face,” she said finally, she didn’t let me defend myself before she carried on. “Like, you have that look you see on people when they can’t find the words they need, except you always seem to have that expression, kind of haunted, it hasn’t changed since I’ve been here. It’s like it’s part of you, y’know?”

I looked at her, there was little else I could think to do. Something about her was working its way inside me, through some tiny opening she was reaching in and trying to fill a blank space. The void was not one of her making, it had always been there; an unidentifiable emptiness. She had merely managed to illuminate it for once.

She looked out the window to the street and then at her watch. “Listen, I have to go,” she said. “Like, y’know, things to do and stuff.”

She took a pen out of her handbag and with a flick of her wrist she scribbled on a napkin and handed it to me. “But you should call me,” she smiled. “Seriously.”

“Well, if it’s so serious I’ll be sure to.”

“Don’t joke, this is serious. Your one and only chance to prove you’re not a cheat.”

She looked unsure for a second and then smiled.

“I’m sorry, that was stupid,” I said.

“It’s okay, I’ll let you off,” she said with a wink. For a moment after she left the air tasted sweet, a hint of sour apples bit my tongue. A moment later and it was gone.

Your one and only chance to prove you’re not a cheat, I heard as I stared at the napkin. Justine, that was her name, and I couldn’t think of any other name suiting her so well. Justine.

I gazed at the napkin for some time. I had not hitherto been wholly without love, but relationships had not come easily to me. I had always worked hard for them, and they rarely proved to be positive experiences. But something about Justine lifted my heart. The heaviness and the sickness were gone and the world seemed a little brighter.

“You’re a damned fool,” I said to myself. But all at once, like I had, to some degree, shrugged off the ballast of my own weight, I felt like flying; having ignited the fire of unfulfilled desires I had been storing up since before I was born.

Something had happened to me. All my thoughts were ridiculous and optimistic. This was not me, this was not how my mind worked. What had this girl done to me? Why had I forgotten about the night before and the assault of the shadows by the river, why was Justine the only thing I could think of?

I took my leave of the café and wandered home in a daze. Along the way I dropped the book in a bin. It’s not going to work between us, I thought, it’s not you it’s me.