Working Late

Patrick Cairns

The thick boardroom curtains licked at my ankles as they danced with the late night breeze. It was a slow, deliberate dance, the wind leading the drapes in a hypnotic two-step away from the window and back again. Away and back. Away and back.

I stood, silent and alone, and watched their gentle movements, my hands wringing in front of me, my mind contemplating freedom. I hadn’t been home in days; I wouldn’t have known where to go. I hadn’t slept in two nights. I hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before. Yet here I was at a few minutes to three in the morning, feeling neither tired nor hungry, testing the uneasy waters off the shore of life. Twelve storeys below me the streetlights lit up bare sidewalks and dirty tar. A nasty fall, with no one around to see or hear. No one to notice an individual stepping out from the crowd.

I wondered how I would have looked to someone if they had seen me through the boardroom doors, standing there alone. My slim figure still well defined, but no longer young, with loose, dark brown, shoulder-length hair. A navy blue business suit, pants and jacket, neatly tailored to fit my body, and a pair of discarded shoes and a black leather briefcase propped up in the doorway like three drunks in a downtown bar. All the signs of success. All strangely out of place, staring out of the window at ten to three in the morning.

I lifted my eyes to look over the city that was folded out in front of me — a picture of streetlights and dark outlines. The gale that had blown all through the day had subsided, and now the wind was content to be playful. The curtains drifted out again, caught my bare toes, and then retreated to rest against the high window. Somewhere above me a nervous moon watched.

I had spent my last ten years in this city, living, dying. But it all looked so different now. I was seeing strange new lines, new patterns, new contours in the way the buildings rose and fell around me. Like notches on a piece of wood, I thought, patterns on a carpet. Who really notices the individual buildings in a city skyline?

I broke from my thoughts as a cloud drifted in front of the moon. I watched it float lazily across the sky, briefly changing the lunar glow from yellow to dull orange and then back again as it carried on its way.

Slowly, I turned and walked towards the heavy mahogany table that filled the room. The scratches and coffee stains of a thousand caffeine-propelled meetings looked up at me from its dark surface. I lifted a hand and ran the index finger along a particularly deep scratch that broke the smooth table-top and as my fingertip brushed over the ridge I had an eerie recollection of a fortune teller who had traced his hand over my creased palm not so long ago. He had given me words and promises through his yellow teeth. I wondered what he would say now.

Releasing my hand from the table I picked up one of the solid boardroom chairs and carried it back to the window. My movements were measured and steady, my body no longer having the will to disobey my intentions. Carefully I placed the chair on the thick carpet with its back to the window. In an apartment room across the road someone turned off their light.

I sat down on the chair with my chest against the support, and drew a cigarette from the packet I carried in my hand. Carefully I lit it and lowered my head onto my arm resting along the top of the chair. The sweet tobacco smoke drifted with the curtains as I inhaled deeply and drew the sweet nicotine into my lungs.

I caught myself smiling as I played with the cigarette packet in my fingers: “Smoking can kill you.” I had read the surgeon-general’s warning many times, but it had never appeared funny before. Now I wondered why the same warning didn’t appear on all sorts of other things: “Cars can kill you”; “Gas stoves can kill you.” My mother’s womb should have carried a warning for me to read before I was fooled into coming into the world: “Living will kill you.”

My smile faded as quickly as it had arrived.

It had taken me all of my thirty-three years to develop a distaste for fate, an unquenchable desire to overcome all that would control and order my life. Over time I felt that I had lost myself, that my movements, my thoughts, my passions were no longer my own. It seemed that there was always someone else. Always someone giving orders or asking for love or demanding attention. It’s all the same.

Still, I might have had a good life. I had a successful career, a good house, an expensive car. I lived more than comfortably. But none of it was truly mine; none of it stilled my violent heart. Wasn’t that the problem? The problem with everything?

I had tried; I had seen life’s “pleasures”. I had travelled through Europe, spent weeks in the Far East. I had been skiing in Canada, I’d climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, I’d swum with dolphins in the Caribbean. Yet still my heart clamoured and cried and beat deafening tunes against my rib cage. My ears couldn’t stand it anymore.

The cigarette had burnt low, so I flicked it out of the open window and brushed my hand against my thigh. It was a habitual movement - something my father had always done and I had come to imitate. Even twelve years after his death I still thought of him every time I did it. He had been a good man, my father, he knew about life. But what he knew, he had never told me. He died before I had the chance to ask. Back then I hadn’t known it would be so complicated.

Lifting my head, I looked down at the road again and my eyes were caught by a large piece of newspaper that was being sent cart-wheeling down the road by the wind. Like a great cat toying with its dinner, the breeze whipped up the parchment and then let it fall, only to catch it just before it hit the ground and throw it into the night sky once more. I pushed myself off the chair and stood slowly, my eyes never leaving the pavement. The whole night seemed to be watching with me as the newspaper skipped down the road. Even after the helpless white sheet had been flung out of sight I continued to stare, perhaps waiting for it to come back, perhaps wishing that it wouldn’t. I wasn’t sure which would be worse.

Eventually I turned and walked cautiously to the near wall. Like huge hollow eyes, the two paintings that hung against the plaster watched me come closer. They were great, disastrously ugly post-modern pieces that I had never liked. The chairman had bought them when the business moved into these new offices, so no one had ever dared to suggest that they be replaced. More ironic, then, that he had privately confessed to me that he couldn’t stand them any more and wished someone would take them down.

Yet tonight, somewhere in the deep recesses of their artistic mayhem, I saw a new life. I saw freedom in their stark lines and liberation in the colours that had been flung across the canvass. If they had voices they would be screaming like poltergeists released from years of confinement in a dusty basement. I still didn’t like them, but perhaps now I could relate to them. I understood why some ghosts continued to scream long after their bodies had died.

I was still returning the ghostly stare of the two pictures when the clock at city hall began to strike three. Three hollow chimes that washed over the quiet city. The sound resonated all around me as the echoes ran through the alleys and skipped between office blocks, flirting with the night air. It was my time.

I turned with tight hands and headed back to the window. For the first time that night my steps stuttered, my feet offering one last protest against my suicidal desire. My hands had begun to shake in front of me and I could feel my heart beginning to thump so violently that the skin all over my body seemed to vibrate with its every beat.

But still I continued on my deliberate path towards the window, marking my every pace, willing my feet to follow each other, step by step. I reached the curtains, now resting and still as the wind had died completely, and with numb hands pushed the glass open wider. Pausing only briefly to catch my breath, I stepped out onto the ledge and into the night. All around me the city lay in dead silence. I thought I might hesitate a little longer, perhaps phone someone, perhaps make another cup of coffee. But no one would understand and the coffee would be tasteless. And I was already outside.

My hands clung to the window-frame behind me as I closed my eyes and offered one last prayer to a God I still wasn’t sure existed. I would know soon enough. I prayed for my mother and for my alcoholic brother. I prayed for my friend Lucy who had just broken up with her fiancé, and I prayed for the guy who sold me muffins in the morning and his wife who had just been diagnosed with cancer. I prayed for the children of Africa and for peace in the Middle East.

I did not pray for myself and nor did I pray for my soul. Freedom was all I had ever required for either. That was only moments away.

My eyes opened onto the empty street. My mind filled with the images of the pictures, the boardroom table, the curtains, the cigarette packet, the chair and the scratch on the table. My legs tensed, my toes curled against the ledge and my fingers started to fold away from the window frame.

Suddenly I remembered the piece of newspaper. Where was it now? The wind was quiet.

I caught myself just as my grip was beginning to slide and threw both arms around the window’s wooden supports. My feet were unsteady but my hands held tight. Did the moon audibly breathe relief? Still shaking, I clung to the window for a second longer, my eyes locked on the road twelve storeys down. Carefully I pulled myself back inside the boardroom and climbed onto the soft carpet. Only as my feet touched the floor did I realise how cold I was. I was tired too, and hungry.

I collapsed into the chair with my back to the window and closed my eyes. Warm, heavy tears dropped off my face. I wiped them away with the sleeve of my jacket and rubbed them off on my thigh. I had been so close. So close to what I had thought was the only way to claim myself. And only there, on the brink, on the very edge of everything, did I truly I discover it. I was crying because I had had to go that far. But in the second that I was about to let myself fall off the ledge and allow my spirit to be crumpled on the tar I had felt it. Something more powerful than I had ever felt before. Something I had been denying myself all my life.

I could have done it. I could have let go, fallen, crashed, broken myself. My heart was calling for me to do it. But for a moment I had stilled its clatter and in that instant I truly felt my life. My tears were of unknown pain and of indescribable relief. That feeling may not last, but its memory would stay forever.

I sat there for a long time, my back curled, my head down, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing but the cold in my feet. Then, brushing away a few final tears, I picked myself up and, without looking at the window, moved past the table and on to the doorway. I did not lift my head to return the gaze of the pictures as I passed below them. I didn’t need to. My feet moved quietly through the carpet until I stopped at the door. I slipped on my shoes, feeling relief at their warmth. Then, as I bowed to pick up my briefcase, something made me turn back to look at the window. The chair still stood there, standing proudly apart from the rest of the table. It was the only sign that anyone had been in the room.

I picked up the case and took a step out of the door, where I stopped once more. I still held the packet of cigarettes in my hand. They would have fallen with me. I lifted them to the light and read the warning again.

“Smoking can kill you.”

Perhaps.

I stood for only a moment longer before my hand fell to my side and the packet fell from my fingers. Without looking down I picked up my stride and left it all behind me.

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