Arch

She’d said he was arch. What did she mean? He wasn’t familiar with the word used like that. Was she referring to his eyebrow? The struggling dense heft of it? But it is straight, more or less, just the hint of a curve, with a blind summit that whips over the bridge of his nose.

He is sitting on the faux leather pouffe by the bay window in his dead mother’s otherwise empty house, turning and twisting arch in his damp hands.

Perhaps she meant his feet. She’d seen them naked when he’d leant against the bus shelter and stepped out of his sandals that first afternoon in Zadar. Rested the swell and pink of them on the cool of the veined marble. Wiped his brow with his handkerchief. That’s better, he’d said, spreading his toes.

She’d been sitting at the other end of the seat in the shelter, thumbing through a guide book. She’d put the book down and studied him, her eyes tracking his rough toenails, the tight skin pulled up hard under his fleshy soles, the bunion on his right foot, a gift from his grandmother. He’d flattened his feet on the stone, allowing the cold to travel up his ankles, up the back of his calves, willed the flow of cool in behind his sweating knees.

He’d put a hand to his face, peered at her over his thumb. Watched her lean over the hem of her yellow cotton dress, push her white ankle socks down, undo her heavy brown lace-up walking shoes, remove them, and rest her stocking feet on the ivory stone. You’re right, she said. It works.

She called him arch on their second date in a taverna near his hotel and he is still mulling over it three months later. It’s not like him to dwell. He’s never known a dwelling like it. But he can’t dwell on her. Not now.

Arch. Did it have a capital A? Would that have made a difference? Her hand was on his when she said it, her brown eyes skewed and her breath olive brine. There was a tension in her fingers but not the one he wanted. Not a ‘she held my hand in hers’ tension. No, a pressing, a forcing even. Was she building an arch? Between them? Over him?

There’s a dead pigeon in the middle of the street. It is flat, apart from one wing that sticks up, sail like, and flaps back and forward in the wind. Three crows circle the bird, hopping towards it in what is surely a choreographed dance. Purposeful. Uppity.  A taxi draws up, the driver brakes hard, and the corvids scatter. But only far enough to avoid the vehicle. They are back as soon as the wheels have passed safely over either side of the corpse.

Arch has no points to fix on. Arch is gallery and ecclesiastical and sandstone red. Arch is a nun’s habit and a choral hymn and night clubs and knock your head off if you stand up too quick in the dead end of the cave they still call Acheron. You’re arch, Peter, she said, pressing her fingers into his knuckles and forcing her teeth into his wrist. He had jumped and his free hand was sudden fist and clench and flying towards her.

I didn’t mean that, he said to her as they stepped out into the night. She didn’t reply.

Vampish, his brother George said, as they looked through Peter’s holiday photos on his phone in the airport carpark. There she was in her yellow dress and clackety shoes and teeth that had just too much point. George is a man of the world, has an Alexa, and bought him, Peter, the latest iPhone and one square metre of the moon for his fortieth birthday.

He rearranges the letters on his palms. Char. Char for charcoal. Charlady. At a pinch, churlish. She shouldn’t have bitten. She left a mark. He doesn’t do marks, indentures, fault lines. His was a life unblemished. Climate controlled. He was pure and she had soiled him. Did he dwell on the nip and tuck of her too white teeth? Only for a day.

It took twenty-two hours to decide.

Arch. Rach. Ratchet. Yes, he’d ratcheted up. Not with intemperate emotion. No. He took his time. Now he sits in his dead mother’s house and retraces every step in the dust on the bare boards around his naked feet.

The crows are sharing their spoils. There is enough to go round. They do it, he is sure, with good grace. They take it in turns to eye and peck and flutter and swallow and fly and return to eye. They would have done the same to his mother if they had found her first. He wouldn’t have begrudged them. Crows have a natural order of things. In an impudent, saucy way.

Maybe she meant saucy, when she said arch. Maybe she had a lazy eye and she was nervous and she meant saucy and she’d meant to kiss but had bitten instead.

Anyway. She is buried now. Under the arch with its scopophiliac view of the Katedrala Svetog Jakova. It was what she wanted. He had been sure of that at the time. Why use the word otherwise?

I wrote this piece off the back of the prompt ‘arch’ in the National Portrait Gallery cafe in a writing session with friends.