Tales of Disturbance

Shell

One strangled creak and Juliet is inside. 

At first, only shadows and swathes of dust, falling, falling like diaphanous fabric. Then a faint smell of magnolias and roses and the air is thin with memory.

Juliet steadies herself with one hand on the cold, grey wall and further objects morph into view: mirrored dressing table; vial of perfume - fallen spilled and dried; standard lamp - neck broken, shade trailing; sewing machine - high on a shelf, observing these faults like a little silver god; sheets of grey marked tracing paper laid out beneath it, like an apologetic offering.

Her eyes drink in this stage-set of the past on its backdrop of spilled perfume and dust and absence. The play is over. Leading lady, gone.

Something is moving near her hand. The thin, mangled body of a wasp crawls along the damp wall. Juliet watches its progress as it travels over a brown stain then a photograph: somebody's grin at the end of a pier; then a postcard: a fish with a single tin eye.

With a sallow finger, she traces its disgusting path. Her finger reaches the sepia photograph; the coastline stretched out like a sleeper behind her mother's wide, even smile. She reaches for the terrible fish beside her mother; peels it from the wall; rips it in two. Decapitates that dead silver head. 

Juliet's eyes float back to the lamp. It was broken in somebody's rage. Her mother's rage. 

No it was her's. Her rage. 

But that was afterwards... 

It is bowed down in penance now; everlasting darkness. For Juliet threw it in malice; threw it to wound her mother, even though she wasn't there.

She drops the fish card on the wooden floor. The pieces slide apart in the dust, and she turns away and ask yourself about the night her mother walked out of this room and into the sea.

Juliet was not there, not anymore. But then again, in her mind, she was there still, searching for shells on the beach with her Grandfather long ago - is it eight years- a few weeks after it happened. That was the night he told her - the lights blurry in the the darkening distance. Suicide- she hadn't known what the word meant. To her young ears it coiled and slithered, like a swear word, over and over; and still she couldn't completely comprehend it.

The wasp takes flight as if realizing suddenly that it is still alive. It's technique is ineffectual; Outside as the sky strips itself back to the bone, the wasp repeatedly smacks its skinny black head against the glass. The sky turns its back to display a spine the size of the world. The wasp growls its tiny frustration.

Your eyes as they watch, are dark as the winter sea.

Juliet looks past it, through the wide window into the falling night. Memory seems to swallow her in its long, dark throat. 

No time on the clock, as her salmon coloured fingers gathered shells on the beach by your grandfather's tweed side. His voice was mendaciously quiet, and when the words finally came, they were like an actor's line, breaking only on the final syllable. She carried on collecting the shells in the gloves her mum had made for her, not looking at him or the sea. Not wanting to ever go home. In minutes, Juliet understood it was her own life, not her mother's that had been flinched from its hinges, and the screams came finally, raggedly, in your throat; like wounds from some drunk surgeon.

The wasp lands. It seems to have lost a part of its head. It's so silent that she thinks it is dead.

The room is colder now, the objects darker. Outside the sky is wearing black. Juliet is suddenly frightened of a tall, white mute standing in the window, staring accusingly back, before she realizes it is only herself.