Apocalypse of Jude

In the living room, Mae’s eyes stare vacantly at the front door from the settee. A car goes by and its lights pass along the wall, silhouetting the burglar bars of the window onto the wall, moving them in fading intensity as the car drifts by. The room returns to its diffuse darkness. She continues staring at the door, cocooned in an ever smaller cage that her mind has created to protect her these three years from the inevitability of what Caul has told her has now happened. The sound of a car door closing, footsteps and a key passing into the door rattle the edges of her cage. She listens frightened to the movements, uneased by their vigour and being wrung with the knowledge that Gary once fit inside this cage. Her heartbeat now races in a wild desperation at needing to make him fit again.

Gary’s eyes look up at her with disgust from the open door frame. “I thought you would be naked already.”

He tosses the door closed behind his back and stalks across the living room into a bedroom on the other side. From inside a cupboard he pulls out a bag, looking up to see Mae with an anguished query on her face in his doorway.

“What you doing?”

“Packing. What does it look like.”

He begins burying clothes into the bag. “I’m going to be living with Paul for the time being until I figure out what to do next.”

Her face blankly registers the name, but inside her, for some reason unknown to herself, a coldness sends a shrill shiver down her spine.

“What am I meant to do?”

He doesn’t look at her. “You can stay here for the coming month. I’ll take care of the rent. All you need to do is find your own place. I’ll deal with tying up this place.”

He stops, crouched, staring into his bag.

“And don’t try to come find me.”

The desperation that has been surfacing within her can’t restrain itself any more.

“Don’t leave me here alone Gary. Don’t leave me here to defy them on my own.”

His whole body becomes very tense and his raised right hand is shaking.

“Do you remember nothing of what you’ve done these past couple of months?”

He has turned scarlet, a sense of claustrophobia clouding his blood.

“You’ve been feeding off me to get the energy for whatever is going on inside you, and then expecting me to carry on like nothing had changed at all.”

“You weren’t interested in knowing what was going on Gary. You pretended you were. But you really weren’t. And that’s what has hurt me most. That you weren’t even bothered with wanting to go through the effort of digging up our love again. It’s like you have been happy to just freeze it completely.”

Nothing is said. There is his coldness and her mouth sucking in and biting. Then from the hidden depths of her soul, a cry comes unheard to all but her. It is a mourning cry not for her dying relationship with Gary as she had thought when they started erupting from her soul at Easter, but as she now realises, for Caul, but not quite Caul, like in a dream. A cry of incessant mourning for his dead spirit. Her hands clamp her head in a vice and start shaking it as she turns from his room. He takes his bag in his hand, crosses the living room and goes out the door, leaving her to her growing hysteria and the intense desire to be naked sweeping through her.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 43