Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves

Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop.

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs.

In their dreams their brains took each other hostage.

In the morning they wore each other's face.

 

Ted Hughes – LOVESONG

 

I sleep with the blind up and the window open. I like the blundering of people in the street below, heading home in the early hours, free of restraint and convention, the wafts of tobacco and spliff. They’re company, of sorts. Sometimes I sit on a battered wooden chair and watch. The same chair I sit on to tie my shoes. ‘Most men do that sitting on the bed,’ she said. Like it was an antisocial crime, and what did she know about most men, quite a lot probably, she was nearly forty, at least ten years older than me. If anyone knew where most men sat in the morning to tie their trainers it would be Iris. 

Sex with Iris was sort of world ending. Like she was getting more pleasure than it was possible for one woman to contain. I felt like the best lover North of Highbury. When she left that night, I leant out the window, as great lovers do, and called down as she shut the broken gate. ‘Hey Iris.’ She looked up, blowing smoke from her fag. Christ she was beautiful. I knew I’d say something cool, like ‘careful getting home.’ She lived at the end of the road above the pub, so that would have been funny. Instead, I shouted ‘I love you.’ Which was not cool at all. She stopped and closed the gate. ‘Right,’ she nodded up at me. And I knew it was over before it had really all begun. She pulled her coat tighter leaving behind her cigarette smoke, drifting past the window, my last taste of her, as it turned out.

I want to be better at relationships. To understand the ebb and flow, to know what it takes to have a girlfriend for more than a weekend. To know what it’s like, to get up in the morning without having to leave, to have breakfast together, to share evening classes and a Netflix account.

And here I am, sitting alone at the open night-time window again. A man trundles along the middle of the wet road, singing Bob Marley, cotton-mouthed, tuneless and happy in his world. A darkened car stops to empty a cascade of tinkling little NOx cannisters, spent, onto the pavement, jewels from a heist, it glides off with a silent engine and a thump of lover’s rock. My road is still again. I like the silence, and I like the intrusion. I’m the only one to see these unfolding things, from my single person’s chair, used for shoe tying and watching.

I hear them first, shoving and shouting in the damp night, the man and woman stagger together down the bleary road. They come into focus for this part of their journey that’s mine. Old trainers and jeans, and despite the cold, just identical Bart Simpson T-shirts. Maybe a homeless shelter handout. I want to know about the T-shirts, the same T-shirts, from the same place at the same time, that’s love of sorts. These raucous twins, name calling, swearing, with the ranting anger of the very drunk. The man has a cigarette he’s carefully trying to light. It’s precious, his swollen fingers hold it like a robin’s egg. The woman slaps it from his mouth. He crawls to find it, a blind beggar reaching for thrown money. She tumbles curses down on him, he’s ruined her life, though he feels it’s her who’s ruined his, but it takes him a lot of yelling to get to the point. She tries to kick him, but standing on one leg is beyond her and she veers off into the neighbour’s hedge.

The man has managed to light the bent cigarette, the woman demands to share it, claiming they used her money to buy it, though this is loudly disputed. The woman sprawls across the man’s back, snatching, while the man tries to suck the life out of the cigarette before she can grab it. For a moment there’s something beautiful, like two swallows courting, twisting together in the air, intent on their moment together, acrobatic and flippant, happily out of control, tumbling and joyous. They both crash to the pavement and the cigarette is lost.

They stare blankly together. The man puts a hand on the woman’s bony shoulder. I notice her T-shirt is way too big for her. She seems to be crying, at the loss of the cigarette maybe, the loss of something, or the loss of everything. 

He whispers to her, words I can’t hear, wise words maybe, warm words, words of hope and love. She slumps into him, and he takes her weight. I watch them for a long time, waiting for the next bit of the story, but there isn’t one. Just these sculptural lovers. There for each other, always, amongst the chaos and the cold.

I wake up, stiff on my chair, dreaming of Iris, and searching for my mad and perfect couple, in the empty morning street.