Blue Light
South Green Street was a quiet street and generally remained so all year round. It was peaceful. Every brick-orange house was inhabited. It was situated near some well-respected schools and had excellent rail links to the city, so was in high demand among young families. Tall fences, walls and hedges separated each detached house, each nuclear family their own self-sufficient, isolated unit. In other words, the kind of street a teenager would hate.
I was in my late grandfather’s study one day when, among his heavy, dusty books on law, I found his collection of poetry. I was attracted to the editions whose pages had yellowed the most. I picked out three: Complete Poetry by Oscar Wilde, Selected Poems by Baudelaire and The James Joyce Collection. There was a willow tree in the garden that my grandfather used to stand beneath for hours, watching its long branches sway in the wind, whenever he heard a piece of sad news. He was a very sensitive man. I took my books and sat beneath the tree, feeling the grass prickling against my legs.
When winter fell, Saul and I didn’t go outside so much. Sometimes, if the weather was dry, we would meet at the green in the dark and talk about the moon. Clouds blackened the sky but when the stars were out it lip up in indigo. I thought it would be beautiful if sometimes stars themselves shone blue. Sometimes I’d see a blue light in the sky but it always turned out to be an aeroplane. Our voices would break the silence on the street. When we met in our houses we lit candles in the gloom and listened to records, reveling in the season’s gothic mysticism. The days were short and cold. Our hands grew stiff and dry when we walked through the nearby grey, muddy fields and I always longed to lie down by the fire and read my grandfather’s poetry. When we returned home, kitchen windows glowed yellow, shadows crawled behind the curtains. We waited round the corner of the alleyway until he left and my mother called me in for tea.
Saul and I stood at the bottom of the steps leading to Sam’s house and waited for her to come to the door to welcome us in. She undid her long ponytail then tossed her head from side to side so her brunette curls rippled down past her shoulders. Saul and Sam went to her room next door to fetch something but they didn’t come back so I was left on my own, dipping ginger nuts in milky tea. I could hear Sam moaning through the wall and it turned me on. I undid my jeans and pressed my hand against myself but then I bit my lip and felt bad about it, so I walked past Sam’s to the kitchen to make more tea and found that her bedroom door had been left ajar. I watched them. Mostly I watched their shadows; two dark figures printed onto a thin blind, illuminated by the street lamp outside. When she caught me standing there my heart leaped because she just smiled and I, blushing, ran down the hall, grabbing my poetry books from the side table and slamming the front door behind me. It was dark and cold. The air was damp with a light shower of rain making the streets shine like jewelry. I walked quickly to the green, turning the images over in my head. It was when I reached the old oak that I realised someone was following me. Sam must have left soon after I did, for she was behind me now. When we reached the gate at the bottom of the hill, she quickened her pace and passed me without a word.
Her image was with me wherever I went: when I walked to school; through the fog and noise of traffic; through the large bustling groups of students descending from buses. I could always see her. In my nightmares, killers went on the run, breaking into houses, forcing victims into vast, empty office buildings and sparse car parks, stalking me while I ran and ran and ran, and she was there. On the occasional sunny days when I would sit in the garden I could not focus on the poetry I was reading. Life became a single sense to me; all noises, images, emotions circled back to her. I tasted her name on my lips. Sometimes at night I would listen to sad songs and cry into my pillow. I did not think about the implications. I avoided Saul. I did not know when I would see Sam again. Sometimes I watched her from my window when she was walking back from school. I felt like an addict itching for my next fix.
One evening I walked back round to my grandfather’s house and stood in his study. It was a dark, starless night and I watched the rain pour down on the willow tree, making it look more wistful, more hopeless than usual. I did not turn on the lights, so I was in darkness. I was thankful for that. I wanted to know what nothing felt like. But this was impossible because one line kept returning to my mind: the time of dreaming dreams is over. James Joyce dug me into an even deeper malaise, and I had to resign to that for the rest of the night. “The time for dreaming dreams is over,” I whispered at the willow tree, and once I had said it, I collapsed into my grandfather’s chair, where I stayed until morning.
Finally, we met again. It was under such ordinary circumstances I did not know how to react. She asked me if I was going to the Christmas lights switch-on in town, and I couldn’t decide whether it would be better to say yes or no. After the silence between her question and my answer had dragged on for too long, she said, “I don’t care much for the lights, but I’m working at the candy floss stall. I’d like someone to hang out with afterwards.”
“Yeah, ok. I’ll see you there,” I said.
“I finish around nine. I’ll text you when to come meet me,” she smiled.
The light was fading fast and a nearby streetlight highlighted her ivory hands draped over the railings. Some boys across the street were shouting and kicking a football. Then Sam went home, and I stood at the railings on my own.
The next two days were wasted in anticipation for the turning on of the lights on Sunday night. I slept in late but couldn’t sleep at night. I completed my schoolwork much more slowly than usual and wrote long, dreamy entries in my journal in curly handwriting, drawing love hearts in the margins. I lost patience with my mother who only wanted to talk to me about monotonous things - for everything was monotonous to me but Sam and Sunday night.
On Sunday morning I lay in bed until nearly noon. I spent the afternoon daydreaming and staring out of my window, my history homework in front of me going nearly untouched. At quarter to nine I bounded down the stairs, put my shoes and coat on then sat on the windowsill next to the front door waiting for the text that Sam had promised to send me.
I stared at the clock and sang to myself under my breath. The last night of the fair…how quickly would I die if I jumped from the top of the parachutes? When it reached five past nine, I didn’t want to look at the clock anymore, so I leaned my head against the cold glass window instead. I traced the path that I had watched Sam take on her way home from school. I saw the shadow of her figure against the blinds and her ivory hand resting on the railing.
My mother came in at twenty past. “What time are you meeting your friend?”
“I haven’t heard from her yet,” I said, agitated.
At half past I decided to walk into town. The night air was unforgiving as I strode down the High Street. Parents clasping mulled wine in one hand and the mitten clad hands of their children in the other were beginning to make their way home. I saw a young couple kissing on the bridge. The lights were switched on now. They lit up the sky with white and blue like the stars never did, illuminating the black river.
When I reached the fun-fair, it was thronging with teenagers getting drunk on alcohol robbed from their parents’ liquor closets. I walked over to the candy floss stall where Sam said she would be. I couldn’t see her, but I texted her nonchalantly that I was there anyway. While I waited, I casually listened in on the conversation behind me.
“Oh! She didn’t?”
“She did. Saul told me and she’s been really weird about it ever since.”
“About him?”
“No, about her.”
“So she’s a lesbian?”
“I guess so.”
“Ew, that’s so weird.”
“I know, right?! Who spies on other people having sex?”
“Yeah so weird. And now she’s obsessed with Sam?”
“Yeah, it’s fucking weird. I could never go down on another girl.”
“Me neither. I mean, it’s not natural.”
“But imagine spying like that. It’s like something a dirty old man would do, you know?”
“Yeah. Weird. And this was Jenn? From our English class?”
“Yep.”
I blushed listening to them, listening to my life being twisted and feeling a deep, deep shame. The weary, greasy looking boy at the candy floss stall asked me if I was going to buy anything. He asked reluctantly, as if he didn’t care for my answer either way.
“No thank you,” I said, just before my voice cracked and my eyes started to fill with tears. “I’m ok,” I lied. As I turned to leave, the girls behind me continued to talk. I glanced back and one of them caught my eye.
I lingered by the waltzer. Part of me still hoping that Sam would reply or that I would spot her somewhere. Then I turned back to the middle of the High Street which was almost deserted now. Empty take away coffee cups and sweet wrappers littered the road. I thought I heard someone call my name from behind, but I kept walking in the direction of the giant Christmas tree that had been erected earlier that evening.
Gazing into the river I saw the reflection of the blue Christmas lights. And I saw my own reflection. I saw someone who was motivated by desire and a romance that I had only ever read about in poetry, and I was filled with sorrow and self-loathing.