(no subject)
Since a few of you asked, the thing I wrote last night; I'm not cross-posting it anywhere, because I'm not sure whether I'm going to incorporate it into something bigger or not (I was sort of fascinated with the idea of unsent letters, and I started poking at one from Ros to her father, &c) or whether it's just a voice development exercise, but I'm sort of uncertainly fond of it, and I could use the petting.
Some sexuality, some British spelling, no cussing, no violence -- I mean, come on, it's Ruth. Will make no sense if you haven't seen the best sequence ever ever EVER from 4.10.
Dear Harry,
All day I’ve been thinking about Blackpool. I never found out how much you actually knew about that; how much you’d worked out, I mean, because I do know exactly what you knew. (Do you ever wonder what the illusion of privacy feels like?)
It’s true, Peter and I ran off together. It was two weeks after Christmas, and I was wearing the coat they’d given me for a present -- it was black wool with bone buttons, and I had it well into my twenties. For a long time it was the nicest thing I owned. I don’t know how we settled on Blackpool; one of us mentioned it as a joke, and from there on out it was fixed, the way some jokes do become. We’d never been there before, but we never questioned why we were doing it, even on our way there.
We drove out, if you can believe it, from Oxford. Peter had a car, an old Ford he’d bought from one of the neighbours and fixed up; he was always good with his hands. I was sure it would break down along the way, but we made it. If this were a novel there would have been something memorable about the B and B we stayed at, or its owner, something grotesque, but there wasn’t. She was a small grey woman in her sixties, and it smelled of lavender and boiled dinners, and the carpets were a little worn, and that’s all there was to it. I don’t know whether you’ll know what I mean if I tell you the ordinariness was shocking; it made what we were doing seem suddenly ridiculous. I think we both felt it, even though she didn’t turn a hair at us. I’m sure she’d seen stranger couples.
We went for a lot of walks that week, through the town and out along the promenade. Nearly everything was shut up, and the sky, Harry, the sky was the most absolute grey in the world -- the purest absence of any colour, even black or white. It made me think somehow of that poem, “There Will Come Soft Rains”; as though the entire world had packed up shop and gone away quietly while we slept. It drove Peter wild. He liked to draw; loved it, actually, every piece of paper he touched would come away with a sketch in one corner, right up until the day he died. He was always sketching then. The sea, the empty buildings. He’d have his gloves in his pocket and his poor hands would be so red you wouldn’t believe he could hold a pencil, but he could.
He gave me that sketchbook when he joined up. To remember him by. I don’t have it any more -- well, obviously, but I lost it years ago.
There was a cinema open showing nothing but American action films, and we watched two of them. There was a cafe where they didn’t mind how long we sat as long as we kept ordering things, so we’d stay through endless cups of tea and pieces of fried bread while he made sketches of my hands and I read out loud to him. I was reading Middlemarch -- I’d packed the three longest books I could find in paperback, and I never got around to the other two, and I’m not sure I remember what they were -- and I kept expecting him to ask for something more exciting, but he didn’t. I never saw him with a book in his hands he didn’t absolutely need for school, but he loved me to read to him. I think he might have been dyslectic -- his handwriting was appalling -- but of course in those days there was no such thing.
And we drank. You wouldn’t believe how we drank. I’d had a glass of wine at Sunday dinner since I was ten, but that’s all the drinking I’d ever done before we ran away. I don’t think Peter was sober between the night we checked in and the morning we left -- of course he found an off-license open, and he was the first person I ever knew who carried a flask. It was a rather beautiful one, actually, dull scratched silver-plate, that he claimed he’d found in a pawnshop; the first morning we were there, at breakfast, he poured what must have been a good finger of Scotch into each of our teacups, and he smiled at me and told me to drink up. I wasn’t ever really drunk (except the first night, when he had to hold my hair back) but I was generally just over the line from sober, and it made the strangeness of everything even stranger.
You’re wondering now if I really did lie to Angela. If I slept with him after all. I didn’t. Not technically. Not really not technically, either, as I understand it. We kissed. Every night from the second to the last, we kissed; there was only one bed in our room, with coarse white sheets and a duvet printed with cabbage roses, and we lay on it, and we kissed. I can’t tell you what it was like, Harry -- it was the most agonizing pleasure imaginable. I felt as though my skin were straining against my clothes, as though they might burn away where I touched them. And one of his hands would be on my shoulder, and the other would be in my hair, and when I moved to get closer to him his body would shift away. He said he couldn’t. He said he was too old for me. And that made it feel dirtier somehow, as though it were really incest we were committing, and we could skirt the wrath of the gods by going so far and no further. And I was eighteen years old, and I’d never been kissed before in my life, and we slept in that bed together every night.
I’ve never been kissed like that since.
In the end we went back because of me. I cried one night. I said I wanted to go home. I didn’t, not at all, but it was easier than saying what I meant -- that I was losing the difference between up and down, that I wanted him to touch me so badly that I thought I’d die, that I was lonely and terrified and worried about my place at Oxford and I felt as though I were falling down a rabbit hole without any end to it -- and I was sure that if I didn’t his next idea would be for us to stay and find work. We went back the next morning. It’s all very ordinary, the rest, and I’m sure you know about it.
That was the first time I was ever in love, Harry. Do you understand?
Ruth
This entry was originally posted at http://thatyourefuse.dreamwidth.org/224701.html. Please comment there if you can.
Some sexuality, some British spelling, no cussing, no violence -- I mean, come on, it's Ruth. Will make no sense if you haven't seen the best sequence ever ever EVER from 4.10.
Dear Harry,
All day I’ve been thinking about Blackpool. I never found out how much you actually knew about that; how much you’d worked out, I mean, because I do know exactly what you knew. (Do you ever wonder what the illusion of privacy feels like?)
It’s true, Peter and I ran off together. It was two weeks after Christmas, and I was wearing the coat they’d given me for a present -- it was black wool with bone buttons, and I had it well into my twenties. For a long time it was the nicest thing I owned. I don’t know how we settled on Blackpool; one of us mentioned it as a joke, and from there on out it was fixed, the way some jokes do become. We’d never been there before, but we never questioned why we were doing it, even on our way there.
We drove out, if you can believe it, from Oxford. Peter had a car, an old Ford he’d bought from one of the neighbours and fixed up; he was always good with his hands. I was sure it would break down along the way, but we made it. If this were a novel there would have been something memorable about the B and B we stayed at, or its owner, something grotesque, but there wasn’t. She was a small grey woman in her sixties, and it smelled of lavender and boiled dinners, and the carpets were a little worn, and that’s all there was to it. I don’t know whether you’ll know what I mean if I tell you the ordinariness was shocking; it made what we were doing seem suddenly ridiculous. I think we both felt it, even though she didn’t turn a hair at us. I’m sure she’d seen stranger couples.
We went for a lot of walks that week, through the town and out along the promenade. Nearly everything was shut up, and the sky, Harry, the sky was the most absolute grey in the world -- the purest absence of any colour, even black or white. It made me think somehow of that poem, “There Will Come Soft Rains”; as though the entire world had packed up shop and gone away quietly while we slept. It drove Peter wild. He liked to draw; loved it, actually, every piece of paper he touched would come away with a sketch in one corner, right up until the day he died. He was always sketching then. The sea, the empty buildings. He’d have his gloves in his pocket and his poor hands would be so red you wouldn’t believe he could hold a pencil, but he could.
He gave me that sketchbook when he joined up. To remember him by. I don’t have it any more -- well, obviously, but I lost it years ago.
There was a cinema open showing nothing but American action films, and we watched two of them. There was a cafe where they didn’t mind how long we sat as long as we kept ordering things, so we’d stay through endless cups of tea and pieces of fried bread while he made sketches of my hands and I read out loud to him. I was reading Middlemarch -- I’d packed the three longest books I could find in paperback, and I never got around to the other two, and I’m not sure I remember what they were -- and I kept expecting him to ask for something more exciting, but he didn’t. I never saw him with a book in his hands he didn’t absolutely need for school, but he loved me to read to him. I think he might have been dyslectic -- his handwriting was appalling -- but of course in those days there was no such thing.
And we drank. You wouldn’t believe how we drank. I’d had a glass of wine at Sunday dinner since I was ten, but that’s all the drinking I’d ever done before we ran away. I don’t think Peter was sober between the night we checked in and the morning we left -- of course he found an off-license open, and he was the first person I ever knew who carried a flask. It was a rather beautiful one, actually, dull scratched silver-plate, that he claimed he’d found in a pawnshop; the first morning we were there, at breakfast, he poured what must have been a good finger of Scotch into each of our teacups, and he smiled at me and told me to drink up. I wasn’t ever really drunk (except the first night, when he had to hold my hair back) but I was generally just over the line from sober, and it made the strangeness of everything even stranger.
You’re wondering now if I really did lie to Angela. If I slept with him after all. I didn’t. Not technically. Not really not technically, either, as I understand it. We kissed. Every night from the second to the last, we kissed; there was only one bed in our room, with coarse white sheets and a duvet printed with cabbage roses, and we lay on it, and we kissed. I can’t tell you what it was like, Harry -- it was the most agonizing pleasure imaginable. I felt as though my skin were straining against my clothes, as though they might burn away where I touched them. And one of his hands would be on my shoulder, and the other would be in my hair, and when I moved to get closer to him his body would shift away. He said he couldn’t. He said he was too old for me. And that made it feel dirtier somehow, as though it were really incest we were committing, and we could skirt the wrath of the gods by going so far and no further. And I was eighteen years old, and I’d never been kissed before in my life, and we slept in that bed together every night.
I’ve never been kissed like that since.
In the end we went back because of me. I cried one night. I said I wanted to go home. I didn’t, not at all, but it was easier than saying what I meant -- that I was losing the difference between up and down, that I wanted him to touch me so badly that I thought I’d die, that I was lonely and terrified and worried about my place at Oxford and I felt as though I were falling down a rabbit hole without any end to it -- and I was sure that if I didn’t his next idea would be for us to stay and find work. We went back the next morning. It’s all very ordinary, the rest, and I’m sure you know about it.
That was the first time I was ever in love, Harry. Do you understand?
Ruth
This entry was originally posted at http://thatyourefuse.dreamwidth.org/224701.html. Please comment there if you can.