Anonymous_aiga_arrivals_bgThe arrivals hall at Heathrow looks like a badly provisioned shopping mall. A hundred branded grottoes to minor commercial gods. Has anyone standing around the chrome barriers waiting for arriving passengers ever bothered to visit any of them?

As she waits, she tamps her anxiety down with objective musings on consumer behavior.  She, anecdotally, has not been to any of these shops. She’s never waited for anyone here – only ever arrived and drifted through the place jet-lagged and craving a cigarette.

Across the barriers, in the waiting area opposite, rumple-suited men hold up sheets of foolscap scrawled with the names of strangers.  Should she have one also? The idea strikes her as both sad and eminently practical.

She’s never seen a picture of him. Until this morning she believed, with a conviction verging on lunacy, that she would know him anywhere. But not now.

Now, in this place, where crowds of coated strangers shift their weight from foot to foot and reek of worn wool and London’s spiteful weather, she curses herself for her unforgivable, mortifying sentimentality.  And she craves a cigarette with the ferocity of the damned.

For a moment, she actually considers leaving her post to feed her addiction in the smoking area outside the terminal. She won’t, of course. She’s given up smoking. Not for the sake of her health, or because the habit has become the contemporary equivalent of walking around with a leper’s bell.

If she kisses him…

No.

When she kisses him.

If.

When.

She wants him to taste her, not the  cigarettes.

The phone in her hand buzzes and courteously presents her with a pushed textual missive.

*Arrived. Past immigration Nazis. Waiting for luggage. You there? *

The handset is sluggish. She swipes at the screen and swears:  her finger too clumsy, her tongue too thick.  She types gibberish.

*I’d hair*

*Amhurst*

*Iambic*

*Fucking autocorrect*

*I’m here*

She wants to scream: “I’m here. Of course I’m fucking here. How could I not be here?” But instead she clutches the phone in her shaking hand, transfixed by the tiny animated progress bar – reminiscent of a syringe delivering a sedative – that assures her the message is being delivered.

It occurs to her then, like a needle stabbed into neural ganglia, that this might be the last piece of pure text they ever exchange. Undoubtedly there will be future texts, but none will ever again be free of the ghost of the voice who might have spoken them. Or perhaps this will go terribly wrong, and there will never be another text at all.

This is why, for so long, he has refused to meet.  He kept repeating that he hated that things would change. And she kept repeating that change happened anyway, no matter what. Like two deaf people shouting at each other across an airport concourse.

Again, she looks at the phone. Somewhere in there, were years of desire, of companionship, of friendship, of acrimony, of gentle gestures, of cruelty, of quotidian moments of tranquility, of promises and phantoms. Technically, they weren’t contained within the memory of the phone, but she could get to where they were stored. Lovingly archived, a digital trousseau of dreams nestled in the sleek bosom of some distant server, slumbering in its climate-controlled bower.  The peculiar intimacy of allocated disk space.  Megabytes of net-cradled lust.  Electron-fed desire.  Sterile white chat boxes hung about with imagined hours of concupiscence, and so many confessions.

The last of the weary travelers have pulled their belongings through the arrivals hall.  A new clump bear luggage tags from other places, other airlines. Her phone buzzes again.

*It’s sweltering here. Must be 85 at least.*

Rehearsal over, she turns and heads for the underground train station to catch a train back into London.

*It’s cold and rainy here. What does Singapore smell like?*


Comments

7 responses to “Transfers”

  1. I loved the changes, as it swayed leading me and misdirecting me. Wonderful.

    Rachel x

  2. RG…. tell us what happened!

  3. Peskipixi Avatar
    Peskipixi

    TFP, this is so classic RG, you should know by now. That’s YOUR job, figuring out what happened… (o;

    Thank you RG, so full of promise and possibilities, yet it makes me feel sad and anxious.

    Beautifully done as always.

  4. I’ve not ‘heard’ concupiscence in a long time. Lends credibility to an otherwise strained paragraph promoting a virtual non-existent intimacy. Good leap back. Enjoy your ‘stuff’.

  5. Anastaria Avatar
    Anastaria

    I have such trouble commenting on your stories, like I need to be wordy or poetic or insightful and it makes me crazy. At the same time I love that I can tell directly what I want to the writer. Still, even that is like a pressure that I can’t figure out how to lift. I apologize if I am better off saying nothing at all. This one left me disappointed, not in you, but in the couple. There should be something else or more. The make believe world they endure is simply sad to me. Also, this should be categorized differently, it is not erotic. To me I feel lonely and saddened by it, but not aroused and there was truly no arousing content.

  6. Stephanie Avatar
    Stephanie

    I love this piece! Two parts in particular. First, when she gets so flustered she can’t type what she wants to on her phone because we’ve all been there. Second, the paragraph that Barry said was strained. I think it’s fantastic. And it made me think about the messages I have living on a cold server somewhere. I may no longer have a relationship to a person, but our exchanges from one point in time may live forever. I think that is very interesting.

  7. JYOTI SHANKAR ROY CHOUDHURY Roy Choudhury Avatar
    JYOTI SHANKAR ROY CHOUDHURY Roy Choudhury

    Loved the style, nice twist!

Leave a Reply to Stephanie Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

fifteen − 1 =

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.