The silence seemed suddenly interminable. There had been pauses earlier, but that particular pause had been a pause too far.
"Did you enjoy your holiday?" I asked, because all pauses, by definition, needed ending.
Indira and I were once lovers but, now, forced together again as a result of some barely bearable mutual friends.
The room in which we sat was empty of people. The various friends had departed on communal activities that had quite excluded Indira and myself. Not so much a conspiracy of abandonment, but more a quirk of fate that had been spun off from the interactions of various clandestine groups of friends. The constituents of each group failed to plan for the likely repercussions and, perhaps, were insufficiently sensitive to appreciate that such consequences actually existed - the residual result of which was the first head-to-head Indira and I had had since we broke up in sodden tears, ten years before. It was High Noon without the noise of bullets.
The room was full of furniture, chairs galore, where the various friends had been sitting earlier, plotting petty plots and even pettier arguments about such plots, some of the various friends as pretty as Indira, some as unpretty as me, yet others in between, neither pretty nor unpretty, but equally boring and pretentious as the rest. The furniture was not to my taste, either - too chintzy, too cluttered, too reminiscent of things I wanted to forget. Furthermore, the same room was where Indira and I had once experienced our happiest, most prepossessing moments
"Holiday? It was OK. Nothing special. I was thumbing through America, with Claude and Michelle."
In this way, Indira had, at last, answered my item of ice-breaking smalltalk. She kept her head averted, whilst speaking.
"Claude and Michelle?"
Their identities had momentarily escaped my mind. They were probably the least bearable of the various mutual friends - or at least one of them was. Claude. Yes, it was Claude who had been mostly tangential to Indira's relationship with me and pretty central to its break-up.
"Just the three of you?" I continued, persisting with the pleasantries despite the unpleasantness of the ambience, for which we were both responsible.
"Yes. It wasn't really a good idea."
"No ... I don't suppose it was."
I hesitated more than once, but the pauses were no longer noticeable.
"I spent most days on my own."
"Where did you go?"
I assumed Indira had acted as a convenient chaperone but wouldn't be seen dead as a gooseberry.
"I wandered through a forest area. It was quite good. I had plenty of time to think."
"Did you come to any conclusions?"
I bit my tongue on the words.
"The thinking wasn't that deep. More a relaxation of the spirit, you know what I mean. Letting it all hang out, random nonsense mostly."
"It must've done you some good, Indira."
I desperately wanted and, paradoxically, at the same time, did not want her to mention how much she regretted breaking up with me and that she'd come to that conclusion whilst on this jaunt in the forest.
"Well, there was one strange incident - it made me think a lot about you, as a matter of fact."
"About me?"
I was genuinely surprised, if not shocked. I failed to credit that Indira had given me a single thought during the latter half of the decade since our tearful break-up.
"Yes. You see, I woke up late in the morning after covering myself in underbrush to stop the dew soaking my clothes. I didn't have a tent because I didn't expect to get lost as badly as I actually did. Well, when I peered out, I saw some children running by. The peculiar thing was they were so silent. They were acting as if they were cock-a-hoop ... in such a way you'd've expected whoops of joy, heroic shouting, laughter, giggling, words of excitement. But nothing. Then, shortly afterwards, a courting couple came by. Again silently. Dead silent, in fact. They looked as if they should be chatting twenty to the dozen - agog with ideas and thoughts and loud messages of love – like we once were."
I could see tears in her eyes and, indeed, sensed a pricking in my own. Her reference to our past affair was quite out of my memory of her character: a most unexpected incident in itself, even stranger than the incident she was recounting. I could not bear to interrupt. There was no possible way I could express my surprise.
So, with the barest pause, she continued, eyeing each of the room's chairs in turn as if speaking personally to each of its ghostly occupants. Quaintly, I guessed the couple she described in the forest had only been silent because they could only whisper sweet nothings to each other.
"Then, when the couple had gone," Indira continued, "I saw an old woman bent under a bundle of sticks. I then appreciated the silence of these passers-by. It was not simply because they didn't speak or even whistle, but their actual foot-falls on the dry crackling path were silent, too. So very silent. I couldn't force myself to believe these could have been people at all - as if I had been watching dreams of people."
"Ghosts?"
I neither intended to humour her nor interrupt her flow, merely punctuate the conversation with polite evidence of attention. I was also perturbed by her continuous gazing at the many chairs; so much so, the idea of ghosts resting their heads upon the chairs' antimacassars rubbed off on me and gained ground in my consciousness.
"No, not ghosts exactly. I know it sounds daft, but dreams of people come out into real life - the only way to describe it I can think of. The courting couple, you see, looked a bit like us - in our hey-day."
I refused to appear as surprised as I was.
"And the old woman?"
"Like me in the future, I suppose, weighed down with sodden sticks - the collapsed shelter where I'd slept."
I held one luxurious pause before asking:
"And the children?"
"They were to have been ours, had they lived."
There was a long drawn-out silence - a posy of pauses, a mutuality of missed opportunities. Then, we heard the exuberant giggling and raucous in-jokes of Claude and Michelle together with various pretty and unpretty friends and so forth, returning like a horde of schoolkids who were blissfully unaware of the sprung silence of dark serendipities they had thoughtlessly left unattended. It was as if Midnight had silently struck - and Merlin shifted in his tomb, Don Quixote saw a stalled windmill with 'tilt' flashing on a vane, Salman Rushdie started writing a cowboy novel called SHANE...
I took out my six-shooter to pretty up Indira's forehead for the returning children. Or was the red moon purely mine? The pause was literally interminable.
"Rests in music are more important than the actual black notes." Rachel Mildeyes (THE ART OF WESTERN CONVERSATION)
(Published ‘Silver Wolf’ 1993)
