Gender Genre Competition

The Top Ten Stories

Lost and Found

 It must be here somewhere, she thought.

She began pulling things out of drawers and dropping them at her feet: packs of playing cards, old letters and old photographs, yellowing shop receipts and a 2 year guarantee for an iron she no longer owned.

Somewhere a clock was ticking, the impatient handclap of time. She could hear a rushing at her back, like the beating of wings.

It can’t be lost, she reasoned. She pulled the cushions from off the sofa and slipped her hands down the back. She brought out dusty coins and a pair of nail clippers that had been missing for months. She found bent paperclips and the stub of a pencil. There was a flattened cigarette butt with lipstick on the filter and an illegible bus ticket folded into a concertina.

Then she was moving from room to room, her searching becoming more desperate. She pulled the books from the bookshelves, emptied suitcases and boxes, looked under beds and behind curtains. It could not be found.

The clock ticked faster. The wings beat the air quicker and she could not breathe.

It must be here, she pleaded. Not lost, but here, somewhere.

Then she was awake and out of breath.

It was dark in the room. The clock by her bed told her it was not yet 2 o’clock. She lay without moving, her ears sharp to any sound. She heard the slowing rasp of her own breathing, heard the bedsprings shift underneath her and the movement of the wind in the trees, the trees tapping at her window with their long black fingers. She turned to where he should have been. He was not home yet, his side of the bed cold.

She threw back the covers and sat up. The air was chill against her skin. Moonlight filtered into the room through a gap in the curtains, a thin blue-grey light that did not reach into the corners. She lowered her legs to the floor and rested her feet on the thick pile carpet. She brushed her hair back from her face and was suddenly aware that her cheeks were wet with cold tears. She tried to remember what it was she had dreamed, tried to snatch it back from the thickening darkness. She clutched at jagged shards of memory, pieces that made no sense: empty bookshelves and open suitcases, a lipstick-marked cigarette filter, playing cards with no numbers in the corners. They were like splinters of broken glass: sharp enough that they cut her somewhere inside; so fragmented that she was not sure what they once meant.

She got up from the bed and shuffled across to the door. She unhooked a thin cotton dressing gown from a peg high up on the door and put it on. She wrapped it across the flat of her stomach and automatically tied the belt into a neat bow.

He was always late now, she thought. She missed him, though when he was there they seldom spoke, and when they spoke their words were always sharp things that jabbed into her where the wounds could not be seen. She crept downstairs without putting any lights on, feeling her way, one hand resting on the stair rail, the other flat against the wall. She took her time, each step taken slowly and deliberately as though she was an intruder in her own home.

The air was even colder downstairs; she wondered if a window had been left open somewhere. She checked that the front door was shut but not locked, then moved into the living room.

Somewhere in the street a dog barked. It was a lonely sound, she thought, a plaintive cry for company. She pulled the curtains open and the blue-grey light chased back the darkness, chased it skulking into the corners. Outside the street was quiet and still. A shadow moved across her lawn, a black smudge of night. It stopped, turned to look at her with its sharp moon-bright eyes, then was gone.

She wrapped her arms about her cold shoulders, like a remembered embrace. That was something that was lost to her now, she thought - his arms holding her, her arms holding him. She remembered another moonlight midnight, and Tom behind her, his arms folded across her nakedness. She remembered the sweet nothings he had murmured in her ear, not the words but the sound of Tom’s whisper and the way it had made her feel, like first hearing the sea captured in the hollow of a shell when she was a child. She did not know when that had been lost – the wonder of seashells, Tom tangling her name up in his sweet whispers, his arms holding her, and hers holding him. That was not so long ago, she thought.

The dog in the empty street barked again. She sighed audibly and turned away.

It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the shadowy dimness of the living room. It looked unfamiliar through the veil of moonlight. She wanted to switch the light on and identify the room as her own, but was afraid that maybe it wasn’t. She thought of a cigarette end with lipstick on the filter found down the back of a sofa. She did not know how it came to be there. She did not know what was dream and what was real.

Then she was aware that something was not right in the room. At first she could not tell exactly what it was. The clock on the mantelpiece had stopped, the hands not quite lying one on top of the other at almost 12 o’clock. Her soft-edged shadow spilled across the blue-grey carpet like a dark stain. She tried to trace its outline, to sharpen the definition and make it recognisably her own.

She became aware, suddenly, that she was not alone in the room. He was there, a slumped shape in his favourite armchair. He still had his long coat on and his polished shoes, but she could not be cross; he had come home, at least, and somehow that was a comfort.

She said his name, but he did not respond.

She knelt at his feet and untied the laces in his shoes. Then, holding the heel, she levered his feet free and set the shoes to attention beside the chair.

‘Not lost,’ she said, ‘but found.’ The words made sense, though she could not have explained why.

She tried to shake him awake, gently at first and then a little more roughly. His face was pale, his hands like claws clasping the arms of the chair. He smelled of drink and cigarette smoke.

She called his name again and prodded his shoulder firmly.

He did not stir.

She combed his greying hair from out of his eyes and the shock of his cold skin against her hand caught her by surprise. She leaned in close and listened, holding her own breath to hear his. The room was silent and still. She waited, strained to hear him suck in the air. At her back she heard again the beating of wings – only this time she was not dreaming.

He did not stir.

Then she snatched at the air, breathed in deep, tasting his stale beer and cigarettes at the back of her throat. She tasted something else, too. He smelled of perfume, her perfume – the woman she never met, the woman who moved in his dreams when Tom slept. There was a waxy smear of her lipstick on his face. She wiped it away with the press of her thumb across his cold cheek.

She loosened the knot of his tie and unbuttoned his collar. Then she fetched a quilted blanket from the hall cupboard and draped it gently over her husband as she had done on other nights, draped it over him now as though he was merely asleep.

‘Home now,’ she said through hot stinging tears. She moved to the window, pulled the curtains shut again and left the darkened room. Before mounting the stairs, she turned the key in the front door. ‘Home to stay,’ she said.

Upstairs she slipped out of her dressing gown and hung it back on its hook. She moved across the floor and crept back into the cold bed searching now for the warmth she had left there. The bedsprings shifted under her weight. She pulled the covers close about her, closed her eyes and felt her breathing relax, become shallow and slow.

Outside the wind fell and the agitation of the trees on the other side of her window stilled. The moon climbed slowly across the sky and the shadows in her room began to shrink.

Soon she was asleep and slowly the dreams she dreamed regained those qualities that make of sleep a friend.

She was pressing flat the collar of a white shirt. The new iron hissed and steamed, clouding the room where she was. She folded the ironed shirt neatly and laid it in an open suitcase already full of old photographs, yellowing shop receipts, twisted paper clips, half smoked cigarettes and loose playing cards – every card that was turned over was the ace of hearts and every heart was black. She shut the case and slid it back in place under her bed.

When she stood up he was there behind her. She felt his arms wrap around her, felt his kisses nuzzle at her neck. He was saying her name over and over again, like the lap of waves on a sandy shore, only each time he said her name it sounded new and full of wonder. She turned to face him and kissed this man that was the Tom she once knew.

‘I’ve been looking for you,’ said Alison.

‘I know,’ he said.

There was a red, heart-shaped lipstick smear on his cheek. She did not wipe it away.

The clock on the mantelpiece downstairs began marking off time again and the new day crept on tiptoe into the room where Alison slept.