Golden Hour

Published in No Parties Magazine, April 2023

He had imagined it warmer than this. His skin wouldn’t pock, and his thoughts would have been free to wash and explore the room around him, the slow creak of wood beneath his feet, the music of garden branches alive with colour through the window, anything really. At a guess, the electric had been disconnected, three, maybe four months ago. It’s funny, how the land and the air reclaim everything; the sea salt snuggling into the window frame, forming tiny passages between the outside and the sitting room of his dead mother’s house. It all joins up, he thought. The world is right here, stretching out and taking root in this shabby room that she had watched Cash in the Attic in, every day for eleven years. 

She must have been bored. The absolute, mortifying thinness of her days. Looking back at it from a distance, he still found them impossible to interpret, those greying and fading years when she was removed and lost from the firecracker she had once been, before the atrophy of widowhood and boredom had taken hold. At least, when he was still showing up to tidy and to order groceries and to drain and to fill and to iron and to cut, —the verb days— there had been a sense of balance. He was dutiful and polite but, and he would never admit this to anyone publicly, he was also filled with a quiet, simple hatred. When he had spoken to his therapist about it, she described it as the sort of hatred that would surprise a person and he had felt that she was right enough, so he hadn’t tried to talk her out of it, as he sometimes did.  

Before he had closed the door behind him, she would be shouting out from the spring-worn couch that carried its smells and stains like a uniform. Is that you? She would call. He wouldn’t answer straight away. Instead, he left a small space, some gap that hung soft enough to soak up the yellowing air, before replying. He would stand there, alone in the hall, and wait; some fat silence eating up the place, until he felt that she was almost about to call out again. If he got his timing wrong and left it too late, a whisper of fear would be there in her voice and, honestly, he would feel a sense of guilt then. The thing is, he didn’t really want to scare her. Just, almost. That’s not to say, though, that he didn’t try to worry her a little. He certainly did. The pointlessness of her question inexplicably seemed to bug him and by letting her question hang just long enough, he hoped that she might feel, unsure. Yeah, that’s it, unsure. 

It would be the only time on those days that the scales would be tipped in his favour. According to her, he owed so much. Money and care and love but most of all, time. The time it had taken him to call, to offer help with her kitchen that needed painting, to reply to the text she had sent him (three days), to pay his phone bill that was still being delivered to her house, to still have that girlfriend with the dyed hair and dodgy politics, to reply to the text his aunt had sent him (two weeks and counting), to not yet have a new girlfriend like the social oddity he was and how the neighbours would now be thinking he had gone and turned gay, to cut his hair, wash his hair, brush his hair, grow his hair. Bizarrely to him, much of what he owed his mother, time aside, was hair related. All of this had left him deeply indebted. The bank of Mum was forever overdrawn in this house, it seemed. 

He curled his toes and locked them tight under the weight of his feet. Pushing down heavily, he felt a slight easing of the tension that had started to build. And breathe, he thought. Right down from the base of his stomach, just as his therapist said. Already, he knew that he would definitely not be telling her about this. 

From the centre of the room he could see Georgia, his dead mother’s neighbour, in her own kitchen across the street. She was craggy, and nasty, and her green bin was always full of food which would spoil it for the rest of them. His Mam had once tried to explain to Georgia how dirty plastics would mean that the whole lorry would just go to landfill but her neighbour had told her to mind her own pissing business which disgusted his mother but which he had found unquantifiably funny. 

Stretching his arms up, his back clicked and shifted loudly. Right, he said to the room, let’s do this. He pulled his t-shirt over his head, his hair standing sharp as static crunched in his ears. He turned to face himself in the long mirror over the fireplace and winced. Thankfully Georgia’s eyesight is as bad as her mobility, he thought. A crease had formed across the line of his stomach, an equator like smile that ran a few inches above his trouser line, punctuated by a crushed, deflated button in the middle. Though the course, wound hair of adulthood had smudged the raw clarity of it, it was unavoidable. He had breasts. There was no other way to say it, really. They had been there since his mid-teens, sagging sadly over his stomach and, no matter how he tried to tense the muscles beneath, to coax some shape of masculinity or strength, he hated them. In his experience, it was the single worst thing that a man could possess and his most acute embarrassment. It left him on the lowest rung of the social ladder. Swiftly ignored by girls and used as punchbags or punchlines by fitter and more popular boys. He could feel it now, in the damp and acid of his dead mothers sitting room, their words pressing hard on his neck. 

A memory, invisible and insistent and knowing, seemed just out of reach. It was fluid, the shifting sequence of a life that had been woven into him, and pricked beneath his skin. While it wasn’t something he could write, or speak or even think about, it was everywhere. It was there in the way he offered himself up to those around him. Giving lifts to people who didn’t like him, chips for friends that spent their last fiver down the pub, that sort of thing. He tried to bat it away. What was it the therapist had said? Count down from five and return to the room, the cold air, the way his crumpled T-shirt was glowing with a deep Balearic orange from the sunlight that was beginning to trail through the window. His breath began to slow again and he concentrated on the way his denim jeans scratched his thighs. Anyway, that was all in the past and sure hadn’t he been trying to love himself for years now? He might tell his therapist that one actually, the loving himself bit. She would like that. 

He opened the window. Open windows are good for letting negative thoughts out, he thought. He shook his shoulders, stopped giving himself a side-eye in the mirror and focussed on the job at hand. The idea, this one; where he got naked, had come to him a few weeks before. His solicitor had said that the paperwork had come through and that the house was ready to be sold and if he had any unfinished business with the place then he should get to it quickly. He was sure that the solicitor hadn’t meant stripping every stitch from his body and screaming like a seagull in the sitting room as a way to show his dead mother that he was finally strong. 

When they were kids, he and his sister had been close. She was something light and pretty and she seemed to move in a quickstep that had made him jealous. Though she was fiercely protective of him, and caring, it was as though they were brought up to speak different languages; hers was fluid and lyrical while his was clunky, ugly and unsure, with vowels that clashed awkwardly. The only things that had made any real sense to him were mathematical in nature. Cogs and balance, equality and clarity. He bought his first camera at twelve and, while composition hadn’t come so easily, the equation of it all made perfect sense to him. Light and exposure, aperture and speed. Too much light and it would tear through the image like a warhead, too little and it was almost dreamlike, all outlines and gloomy approximations. He likened it to how exhausting it could be spending time around his mother sometimes. When he was younger, the sheer volume of her was overwhelming. Her arms thrown wildly into the air when she spoke, all bulging eyes and scattergun thoughts. He would hide behind corners in the house, or under tables and desks, hopeful for even one minute of respite. The stillness of blank spaces grounded him and when he thought about it years later, the only rationale was that it was easier to make sense of the world when he wasn’t standing directly in front of it. 

He exhaled loudly, stepped out of his jeans and kicked them under the couch. The skin on his legs prickled, thousands of tiny needles rippling across him in waves. He thought that he heard the jeans hit something, a golf ball or pen, but he ignored it. Crouching onto his bare knees wasn’t all that appealing and he needed to keep his eyes ahead, on the window, making sure that nobody passing by. He thought of his mother then, watching daytime television in the final years before the twenty a day overtook her. By them, the energy of her had dissolved and become flimsy and wretched. Left in its place was a sort of apathy. Apathy for the pathetic life she inhabited, or for the cold smugness in her eldest daughter’s voice, or the cat that left trophy mice in the kitchen for her to tidy away, or the way neither of her useless children even tended the grave of their alcoholic father, or for the directionless son that couldn’t even cut the grass properly when he finally bothered his hole to call around to see his poor oul mum. 

The sun crept higher over the roofs of the houses across the street. It was high enough now to flood the room, to blind him, to light his skin like photographic paper. He stood there, in the cold and yellow light, and screamed every hurt he had known into the rising sun, roaring until the tendons in his throat were purple and dry as bone. 

After, turning the key in the front door, he tried to name the feeling that was sitting with him. The therapist would ask him anyway, so it was better if he rehearsed it in advance. He had expected to feel new somehow, as though he has been cleansed, or purged, but he didn’t. Whatever it was, it wasn’t new and he didn’t feel any lighter, or purer, or happier. He guessed that screaming yourself hoarse in the nip wasn’t going to be the most enjoyable experience. It moved like waves through him, and it was one he had known before. Balance, he thought. Yeah, maybe. The winter sun was exact and incredible and harsh enough to equal the wide whiteness of his naked body and he thought that maybe he could be a blank page again. And that stripping off had been enough. And that standing in the soft pink of twilight outside Georgia’s terraced house, in the first new clothes he had bought since his Mam had died, he knew more about himself than he did before.