gill
I think we will all remember a positive woman when we think of Gillian. She even attempted to write to the future. She’d read about it in a magazine. Apparently expressing yourself in letter-form and addressing it to tomorrow would unleash your inner positivity and allow you to “redirect the unhappy traffic of your psyche back to the delete folder. Permanently!” She got as far as ‘Dear Future’ and then realised that she had to pick up Dennis from the garage so left off there.
She had the sort of hair that always looked ‘set’ did Gillian. Not in a grand way, more in a Princess Anne sense. As though her hair just arranged itself that way, like a piece of ready-assembled furniture. Function over form. Similarly brown it just hung there, determinedly. That’s how she’d come across the notion of writing to the future. In a magazine about whether long hair was acceptable for the over-50s. It wasn’t. Maybe her letter was going to be about that. Dear Future, I’d love long hair if that’s OK?
She’d been a publican. There they called her ‘Gill’. Or occasionally ‘Gilly’, which she did not like. She once had a litter of kittens in a box of Walker’s salt and vinegar. The mum cat strolled around the Bailey’s and Taboo while Gill served Shandy Bass and Sheridan’s Liqueur, and then would return to her cardboard brood. No one knows what became of the kittens. That were true of most things in Gillian’s life. The answers just disappeared. The second parts of stories just seemed to never happen, or at least never be told.
Like where did she meet Dennis? Why did she stay? Was it true he used to poo in the dressing table drawers when he was pissed? Did she really leave her kids all locked in the house one night while she went to the local? Why did she always sit facing a door in any room she went in? Did she really not know her brother was gay? Did she keep the icing off Peter’s birthday cake in a box and look at it every day since he died? What happened to all those goats?
She wasn’t an enigma. None of this was exciting. She was just a void. Like the hair. A frame without movement or life. Or maybe that’s not quite right. After all the stories began. The goats existed. Poo definitely appeared in drawers. You just never knew what was next. No answers, or endings, or resolutions. And maybe that’s right. Maybe there is no next. Maybe tomorrow just evaporates each night. Burned off by the sun who, each dawn, insists on us all just being here, not there, here. Here. Here and now. Shusshing all this talk of this ‘tomorrow’. Maybe the answers to all those questions and the rest of the letter to the future, just all fall off the edge of time every morning. Like the 2ps on the shiny moving shelves in the arcades. Rattling down the slots with promise. Gathered up delightedly in coin-hot hands. But just returned to the sliding shelves in an endless cycle that has the sheen of motion, of hope, of answers, of tomorrow, but is, in fact, just animate stasis. Just the noise of tomorrow clinking ever back to today. Slaloming down, lying flat and being slowly nudged towards the edge.
