And how it goes with Toby Who: Really, Lily Randall and Clyde. What: How the Randall girls fare. When: Today Where: Randall flat.
The place is quiet -- low thrum of life persisting through temporarily stilled and sluggish veins but life persistent in dripping tap (the one that does not turn off after countless tools twisted and protests made, a spanner lies to one side, sullenly accusatory in ever-constant vigil beside steady leak) and the flicker of sunlight passing through thin curtains to pattern out across the floor. It is a subdued quiet; life within turned down to passing hum -- there is a woman on the bed in the far room, sprawled out like broken marionette, exhaustion in the slick of sweat across the forehead, in unbuttoned polyester at the neck. There is a woman on the bed and her head is turned toward ajar door, as if in sleep she might suddenly fumble upward, stumble half-blind past the sole spinning fan in the place (constant stream of warm air turned futilely toward only awake occupant, not counting the scritch-scratch of rats in walls and pleasant existence of spiders above the kitchen sink) -- as if in sleep (as she curls herself around herself, protector and protected if only by herself -- as she does not sigh nor murmur but sleep snatched too deep for such things) she might still watch, still oversee.
In that room, that bed-room, the place smells like thick sweat and exhaustion, like giving up and the grease of meat, like burned down coffee and charred polyester. It is a scent that twines itself like a noose around the sleeper’s neck. Her hand lies clenched against the pillow. There is a name-tag in it. A loose thread against her chest, above her heart shows where it has been twisted free. The tag is cheery cherry red plastic, a chipped ‘Hi, my name is!’ above faded permanent marker.
But the place still lives, does not sleep on as she does. There is a tumble of noise spilled out soft against slow warm air, babble and words mingled together in secret language as the child in the play-pen (small for such a child, one as old as she, but baby-barred from all the harm that might be caused her and seemingly content enough with scattered, battered toys within) keeps up airy conversation with nothing tangible at all. Bright little child, all sunshine-bent head and busy fingers, quiet voiced (and remembered screams are held by the walls alone, Lily merry with lack of memory of night’s wakeful stretch, howls and shrieks) but talkative. Look closer and see all the toys forgotten, small hands stretched out toward heat-ripple or disturbance, see bubble of not-quite-sensible speech turned full-torrent toward it, Lily conversant as magic (thin and silky, gossamer-delicate and easily torn in this place so full of well-kept anger, of nursed resentment, but magic all the same) shifts sideways, twists itself into this reality and gives lonely child (all credit due, a handful of hours most; all the woman on the bed might manage in grit-eyed sleep) a companion to idle heat-soft time away.
Lily of starfish hands, reaching-reaching toward fragile girl-thing, bones and skin of air and magic heart’s blood and sparking synapses. Lily who chatters and coos toward familiar friend, haunt of these pieces of passing time in which she is left alone with magic world to hold out toys in hope of play, to pat fingertips against airy cheek. For Clyde -- Clyde who is visitor, wanted guest and interloper also (interloper indeed to woman asleep, to woman quite unaware of baby’s heart-friend) Clyde is often-presence and never-enough here for Lily Randall, Lily who holds out one thing that becomes two things the same to the molecule, who waves it bright and gaily as a gift for a companion that can never take it.