She is sitting at the table. Top floor. Looking out. Yes, the woman could be doing something more interesting. Windows are such overused mechanisms in the arts. But, if she didn’t look out of the window, what would be the point of windows?
The woman is watching a window cleaner. The man is on a ladder, leaning into his work, wiping cloudy water off the glass with a scraper. The man has the trousers of a painter and the belted toolkit of a carpenter. The woman is surprised to see the man. She doesn’t think window cleaning is an essential service. On Easter Friday too. Although, considering the issue for a bit longer, she changes her mind. If eyes are the windows to the soul, a dirty window is not what we need right now. Never have souls been so important. And never have we needed so badly to be able to look into them. She won’t report the window cleaner. She used to be one to make a scene. Not any more.
There is a cat going about the woman’s legs. The cat, under-fed, though probably over-loved, is making small sad sounds that continue, unabated, as the waves do, lapping on the nearby shore. Without further explanation you’ll come to your own conclusions.
The woman is too poor to feed the cat.
Cat food is no longer available.
Or the woman is a witch.
The sun, bright through the naked window, does seem to be throwing the shadow of a coned hat across the light and dark of the room. In this scenario the cat is definitely black.
The plain truth is that the cat is on a diet. The cat must lose 300g in weight. The woman is doing her best to make that happen. She doesn’t always get it right. The cat is the only corporeal thing in the woman’s life right now. Sometimes the woman buries her face in the cat’s soft white underbelly and weeps. Or does she?
Beneath the woman’s feet are wooden floorboards. Beneath those, a child is laughing. A younger child is singing. It’s not possible to know whether they are boys or girls or one of each. You assume that that the children are alive. I’ve already told you that the woman is on the top floor, looking out. But if the woman is indeed a witch, the evil kind, even though the cat’s only on a diet, the children may be dead. Dead and dried and mewling. Wraiths warbling up out of the black ash and crushed shells that separate this floor from the one below.
But in this time of pandemonium and pandemics and a run on pancake flour, desiccated children are simply not required. Readers, and I include you in this, need to be consoled, cossetted, wrapped up with velvety words and slubs of reassurance. There are no dead children under the floor boards. If there had been, I would have been sure to mention the smell.
The other sound, above what is a rather lovely tinkle of young children being young, is the wind. The zephyr, thrilled finally to be taking centre-stage, is poking around the corbels, rattling spits of gravel on the window ledge, sending wisps of plastic whimsy spinning and whirling above the empty street. The woman opens the window to let the new sounds in. The swathe of silence inside has been in danger of becoming a shroud.
A pigeon lands on the guttering. The woman hears the bird’s toes click and curl around the lead rim. The woman catches the pigeon’s eye. The woman and pigeon sit there for a long time, eye to eye. The woman is pondering the shape and colour of the pigeon’s soul. You’ll have to decide for yourself what the pigeon is pondering, if anything. They sit together for longer than is comfortable for the woman. Less so, perhaps, for the pigeon. But the woman cannot stop looking out.
SANDERLINGS 