Ten Books
TEN BOOKS by DFL
Hazel knew there was something special about Bill. She’d been in and out of affairs since the year Dot left her for another woman. She still felt yearnings for Dot and the type of sex she (and other women before her) had once provided; but now men seemed to possess more of what Hazel began to teach herself to need. Bill was the umpteenth candidate to the nth degree: and infinity was indeed the target for which she aimed in her emotional and physical complexities of any momentary desire or lust.
Bill was coming for dinner, bringing, he claimed, a present that would give her more than just love. After all, he said, you have love already, you have me.
She had spent most of the day preparing the menu, but couldn’t, it seemed, actually get down to the shopping for it -- let alone the cooking. She had been interrupted at one stage by a call from Dot, wanting to know if she could come to a hen party? No, Hazel had said, Bill’s coming round tonight. With a present? How had Dot known to ask that? A peculiar question. You’d’ve expected her to ask about Bill himself, if she were a true friend, not whether he was bringing a present, which, of course, he was indeed bringing, but that was a side issue to the relationship and to the forthcoming dinner, except it wouldn’t be a dinner at all, unless Hazel got her skates on and putting a halt to Dot’s call would hopefully be halfway to accomplishing at least that.
Did Dot know Bill? To Hazel’s knowledge they had never met. Bill, Hazel had always assumed, was just a name to Dot, someone Dot simply asked after before she immmediately went on to talk about hen parties and so forth. But Dot must know something about Bill more than Hazel had told her. Why the present question, otherwise? This nagged her as she prepared to ring the supermarket to see if any of their delivery vans were free. Except she pressed the wrong button on her mobile menu and got through to Dot again. Did she want to go to the hen party, after all, Dot asked. No, Hazel claimed, but she wished somehow she was going to the hen party rather than having all this worry about doing dinner for Bill. The doorbell went. Abruptly. Surely not Bill already. Curtains for Hazel if it was.
****
It’s now much later. Bill had arrived soon after the groceries were delivered. The groceries had been the earlier doorbell, Hazel having forgotten -- amid all the fuss created by two people from her love life in unexpected and mysterious cross-section -- that she had already ordered their delivery. A nice lad from the check-out carried two large banana-boxes of provender into her flat’s hallway and left with a tip and two winks, as if Hazel and the lad had opted for winking at each other before waiting for the other to do so. Bill was much older than this nameless delivery lad, of course. Ah well, no point in hankering after younger flesh, and Hazel waved the grocery lad goodbye from her window as he slowly drove off in the supermarket van.
It was then she noticed that one of the banana-boxes was not full of groceries for the forthcoming dinner but contained ten books. Being abruptly followed by a quirky tune on her doorbell which portended Bill’s premature arrival, she did not have time to investigate these books, despite knowing, without counting them, that there were ten.
She used what few groceries had been delivered in the other banana-box to rustle up an emergency snack for Bill who had not only brought a present but also the customary bottle. They drank the bottle and Hazel put his present aside on the tallboy for her future attention. Waving goodbye to Bill was a peculiarly long drawn-out affair as he had mixed waves with attempts at kisses. She was rather pleased to see the back of him as she needed to investigate the books in the box. The ten books.
Bill’s present remained on the tallboy for ucounted time, and Hazel on the shelf for even longer. Bill never returned. If he couldn’t manage to plant a kiss on Hazel what else couldn’t he manage, he must have wondered. And Dot never invited Hazel again to any of her hen parties, which loud and wild events seemed to be happening more and more as the years went by, judging by the shrill catcalls that echoed outside Hazel’s flat every single night about one a.m. onwards.
The books that the inscrutable lad from the supermarket had inadvertently left in her hallway instead of half the ordered groceries did prove to be a consolation prize for Hazel rather than a cabbage on Double-or-Drop. They were books she firstly began to puzzle over as they were blank, except for squared-off areas for each date in the future. But why only ten? Surely, she would need more than ten. The first book started on the exact date she received the box of books and lasted to the end of the current year. The others were for the whole of the nine subsequent years, each with carefully squared-off areas of blank paper for each date, even Leap Year gaps.
She wrote in the very first square in the very first book:
“Saw Bill today. And a lad with a rare smile. Dot rang. Not sure whether she will ring again. Bill left a present. It is not a very interesting present. Tomorrow I shall widen my expectations of life.”
*****
The books were tantamount to conscious. They woke in the deepest watches of the night. They often saw Hazel clamber upon a shelf that had been manufactured from darkness just above the skirting-board.. Then, later, as she began to shrink, they saw her attempting to climb the tallboy itself -- to reach a dark packagey shadow on its top. They felt empty. They pretended to imagine redness articulating into spidery joined-up meaning across their own blanked-off square areas. One by one they filled up. Till the last one to see Hazel pretended to imagine a grey-haired deliverer and then no more. A collection, perhaps, rather than anything else.
The last bill had been paid. And year dot was still aeons away, great empty expanses of duration for others to fill with their own messages to infinity without really understanding what sex acts were needed to flesh out the present.
Hazel had been her own gift to time, perhaps. Taken as read, writ large in blood.
****
The last square, the last entry:
“Had another dinner party. Bill came with another present. I let him kiss me this time. Perhaps there is more to him than meets the eye.”
Posted by nemonymous
at 1:07 PM GMT
Updated: Wednesday, 5 November 2008 1:08 PM GMT
