The Woman with the Blue Dress
by Kate Medhurst
A trace of wine floats on my breath and I wear circles under my eyes like bruises. It’s not too bad considering it is early morning on New Years day; the morning after the night before usually feels much more hazy and unkind than this. Perhaps the celebratory good vibes have yet to leave me.
I appear to be the only person awake and I know I am only person working on this street; there is little need for the garlic presses, soup ladles and baking trays from the cook shop next door and people can live without the curtains and lace from FabricWorld today. Newspapers still come out on News Years day though. I don’t mind really, I can do with the money.
I tidy the cigarettes, wipe clean the counter and fill up the alcohol shelves which were almost stripped bare last night. I sweep up, go through the fridges and even top up the ice-cream although I doubt there will be much call for it; the frost is melting in the sun but the wind is still pushing through fences and throwing litter across streets; severe wind which freezes bones.
Then everything is done and I wait for customers to begin crawling in with black-circled eyes like mine and hair like knotted candy-floss.
Flyers from the night before and the occasional crispy oak leaf blow inside the shop. The wind has lifted everything from hidden holes and overflowing bins, has blown them through the deserted streets and through the shop door which refuses to shut completely. I pick everything up, handfuls of crumpled paper advertising cheap drinks, buy one get one free and late night opening hours. But the wind is relentless, no sooner have I settled behind the counter then another fury of litter dances inside. I decide to clear some of the litter from the street outside. If I clear the pavement then nothing can blow inside surely?
I’m outside picking up empty take-away boxes and chip paper; it’s cold and my breath creates frosty clouds before my face. I see someone walking up the road and at first it feels like a scene from The Shining; the street is like one of the deserted hotel corridors, the woman walking towards me one of the haunting girls.
The woman is small; wears a blue dress with white lace trim. Her clothes from the night before maybe? I can’t see her face; her hair is long, dark and edging towards wild. She sways towards the shop but does not look at me. I leave the pavement, the litter, the frosty air and go back inside, settle behind the counter. I’m pleased to have someone to serve at last, tired of sitting in silence, listening to my lonely sighs and the creaky floorboards.
The door opens and the woman stumbles in. She stares at me and I notice that her eyes are vacant; she is young, in her early twenties. There are smears of dirt across her cheek resembling a child’s finger painting and she is biting her lip.
“Morning,” I say. My voice sounds awake and enthusiastic. I am happy, remembering the revelling of the night before; stolen kisses, energetic dancing, cocktails with umbrellas. I almost tag “Happy New Year” onto the end of my greeting but the woman does not look happy so I stop the words from forming.
She continues to stare at me and I feel uncomfortable. I smile, sit down on the stool, still she does not speak.
Instead the woman turns sideways, lifts her hand and stares at it, her eyes widen and she mouths silent words.
“Are you ok?” I ask. She doesn’t look ok.
She turns and looks back at me.
“He put his hand on my shoulder,” she says.
The woman’s eyes are focused intently on her hand. Her fingers are narrow and crooked, her nails short but dirty; it looks as though she has been scraping her fingers through soil.
“He put his hand on my shoulder,” she says again.
I nod slowly as though I understand but I don’t know what she is talking about. There is another silence between us and she scratches at her knees, lifts the satin material of her blue dress and scrapes red lines into her thighs.
“I put my hand on the sofa and it burned.” The girl whispers the words and then stops scratching and lifts her hand once more, stares at her fingers and grubby nails. Then she rubs her hand furiously as though extinguishing invisible flames. I can’t see any burns to her hands though, only dirt.
“Are you ok?” I ask again, words trembling, memories surfacing. I don’t know what else to say.
“I put my hand on the sofa and it burned,” she repeats.
There is more silence but this time I am thinking of myself not her. Her words invoke memories; mixing, twisting memories which I haven’t thought about in a long time. It’s funny how one sentence takes me back so many years…
“Come on darling, come with me,” my mother says. She is gripping my hand and I can’t see through white smoke which seems to curl around me, embraces my small frame, hugs my thin nightdress. It chokes my throat and I cough dryly.
I am hot, so very hot. My face is red like the cherry colour my mother paints on her lips. I feel drops of water trickling down the side of my face, water running into my long hair. My eyes are dripping too.
“Just come this way, it’s nothing to worry about.” It’s my mother’s voice still, forcing calm words to tumble from her own coughing lips. My vision is blurred not only with smoke and tears but with sleep; woken from dreams only seconds earlier my eyes are taking time to adjust.
We walk past the living room, only it doesn’t look much like our living room anymore it looks strange, almost like God’s living room; filled with clouds and magical licks of orange which seem to sparkle like bright gold. I see Goggly on the sofa, my favourite cuddly toy. Suddenly I want him so much it’s unbelievable. I want to touch his soft fur, to see his funny eyes, to hug him. I wriggle my fingers and break free of my mum’s hand.
“Chrissie! God, Chrissie, what are you doing? Come here, baby come here!” mum screams but it’s too late. I reach for Goggly, not noticing that his eyes are not wobbling as they normally do, not noticing that his fur is burning.
As I reach for the sofa, stretch my hand out for Goggly, I feel a pain so intense that the world seems to fall into silence and darkness. My hand sizzles.
I remember it so vividly now and yet so much time has passed I barely think about it these days. I run my thumb over my finger tips; just red skin now, hardly noticeable. Our house had more than faint scars though; walls were blackened, the roof collapsed, tiles fell, windows shattered. Possessions burned.
The woman in the blue dress is no longer standing. She is crouched down and rocking on the floor, her legs are slightly open and I can see her white knickers. Her dress is ruffled over her thighs and I see dirt marks on the dress too; perhaps she has been digging through soil.
“I touched the sofa and it burned,” she says rocking still, stroking her dress, smoothing down the satin over her thighs. She wears grey-white socks and grubby trainers with fraying laces. Her eyes are vague, looking, searching for something, she stares at the ceiling, the walls, the floor, her hand again. She strokes her dress.
I wonder if she has taken something. I have never taken drugs and feel naïve; is she ill? Does she need help? Is it a bad trip? I remember my teacher talking about acid at school once: “There is a well documented story,” he said, “about a boy who took acid. He thought he was an orange and took a knife from his kitchen, locked himself in the bathroom and started to peel his own skin off.”
I remember cringing, wrinkling up my face, feeling sick, imagining skinned hands and legs, imagining a boy skinning himself. Years later someone told me the story was only an urban legend. But it was real enough to scare me away from drugs.
I liked the teacher who told us the acid story. His name was Mr Reece and he was funny, made us laugh. He had huge glasses and a brown suit and he smelt of tobacco. Kids at school always thought it was cheeky; that teachers smoked freely but if a student got caught smoking they were given detention. Last year I heard that Mr Reece died of a heart attack. I nearly cried because I’d always imagined dropping into my old school and thanking Mr Reece for making me laugh, for making lessons fun. Sometimes it’s nicer to remember people as they were, not what they have become, or didn’t become. Like my first boyfriend. I discovered he had become a drug addict. It’s much nicer to remember him as an innocent eleven year old who held my hand and told me he loved me, who gave me my first kiss and taught me the word ‘snog’.
I haven’t thought about Mr Reece in a while, I haven’t thought of Goggly or my hand for a long time either. Yet this woman makes me remember both and she has uttered only a handful of words.
The young woman continues to rock and I think about the orange peel story again. It haunted me because I had such a vivid imagination but some of my friends didn’t hear the story, or didn’t care about it. My friend Kirsty took something once; told me about swirling colours and orange skies, about thinking she was able to predict the future, about everything feeling amazing. She also told me about a bad trip where she saw demons in the sky and in the faces of her friends and tongues that turned into hissing snakes. She told me about screaming so loud she thought her ear drums would burst.
Kirsty also said that during the bad trip she thought her hand was on fire. I said maybe that was because she had seen my burnt hand; as little girls we had held hands and skipped to classes and she had felt my shiny skin fresh from bandages. She didn’t think it was that though, she said that the small flames had climbed up her wrist and wound round her fingers. I said that the skin on my hand seemed to melt when I grabbed Goggly.
“That’s gross,” she said.
“It’s true,” I replied.
And the girl continues to rock.
I remain quiet and watch her, feel uncomfortable as though I am intruding in this moment in her life, but at the same time I feel she has intruded in my life too.
The door opens and Marie comes in for her paper. Marie comes in every morning through rain, fog or snow; hail the size of golf balls wouldn’t stop her. She stares at the woman on the floor with her blue dress and dirty trainers and manoeuvres around her, picks up her paper and comes to the counter.
“Is she ok?” Marie asks and I shrug.
“I don’t know,” I say. I look up at the clock and realise the woman has been rocking for ten minutes now.
“She just keeps rocking and doesn’t respond to anything.”
Marie hands me 35 pence for her paper and goes up to the woman.
“Are you ok?” she asks and the woman looks up at Marie and lifts her hand.
“I touched the sofa and it burned.”
“Ok,” Marie nods gently and then looks at me and shrugs. She doesn’t know what to do either. We stare at each other, maybe the woman’s words have evoked memories in Marie too.
Marie opens the door, “Maybe you could call the police,” she suggests and then she walks slowly away and is gone. It’s just me again, alone with the woman and her dirty trainers, her soil encrusted fingernails, her dirt-smudged face. And her burning hand. Then the woman stands up, stares at me and holds up her hand.
“It burned,” she says, “the sofa burned.”
I nod and remember being six years old again, I remember my mother screaming at me, screaming for an ambulance as my hand seared. The doctors said I was lucky, said I had only surface burns. My mother hugged me at the hospital and wouldn’t let go. I remember going back to our house and staring at the outside, I remember how the windows looked like giant eyes, the smoke damage resembling mascara smudged by relentless tears.
All these memories evoked from five words. I hadn’t known Mr Reece then, my teacher had been Mrs Wright and she had asked the children to give away one of their toys because little Chrissie Turner had lost everything in a terrible fire. I remember how boxes arrived from parents; clothes, toys, books, even a television. My mother said I was the luckiest girl in the whole world. I didn’t feel it with a bandaged hand though, I didn’t feel it without goggly.
The woman holds up her own hand again, grubby but not really burned. Then she slowly turns her head, looks over her shoulder through the glass in the shop door and she opens it and lets herself out. Her trainers scuff the pavement and she stops and looks up and down the street before swaying away.
I go to the shop door and watch her walk down the street. Marie is gone and outside seems deserted again but for the woman and her blue dress and a can rattling down the street, striking the curb and blowing into the middle of the road. The wind has picked up. I wonder where the woman is going. Perhaps I should have called the police, I should have helped.
I yearn for customers, new faces, new people, and new words to take away the confused tones of the woman in the blue dress.
The poor woman; she touched the sofa and it burned.