My lover Lily was found dead in the canal
by Sue Vickerman
(this is part III. Read
My lover Lily was found dead in the canal
from the beginning.)
If you were still alive…
…my floundering would continue to freak you out, Lil. Like, today I have an appointment with a man off the internet…
….but what if he has no intention of turning the virtual thing we’ve had into reality? So will not be outside Leeds Travelodge at eleven when I get there in the businessy-looking outfit he wants me to wear with court shoes; will not emerge from the Travelodge just as I’m retouching my lipstick out of nerves, take my elbow and steer me into – no, not straight into the hotel, but round the back, where the bins are, where rubbish has been spread across the alleyway by cats or by an urban fox so that it smells bad in the sun, where he pushes me against the redbrick and speaks in a low menacing voice the kinds of words he writes when we chat online… what if the national economy crashes today between my departure from home and arrival by train at Leeds, at Leeds Travelodge; something so momentous that public transport stops, or maybe it is a terrorist attack, everything stops, or some sort of magnetic force caused by a comet that makes all the clocks and watches stop, or jolts the world out of its timing, so that eleven o’clock doesn’t even happen and I do not arrive at the Travelodge and will not be taken to the anonymous room he has already booked and paid for, steered by the elbow in an ecstasy of anticipation… what if he forgets the whip. Or doesn’t use it. Or doesn’t look at all like the name he has given himself so that I cannot bring myself to call him by it. Christ, what if he just downright doesn’t want to do it to me after all this, all this talk. What if his wife. His little daughter. What if the civil service department he works for. What if you had not topped yourself, bitch, and left me to my floundering. What if instead, I stay on the train past Leeds and end up in a god-awful seaside town in perishing cold looking out at the polluted sea, at a lone cockle-picker like a dot on the ever-increasingly black-slicked quicksands, and I feel afraid for that person.
Life is so fragile.
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