Mary's Broken House

The latest WORDHUNGER story below finished today. 

I am very grateful to Dominy Clements for sharing and/or guiding the last few Wordhunger stories with me, including this one.

Mary's Broken House

 The past is often hidden amid the skirts of time, but I do recall
that the room was broken. Its ceiling was the only part that
remained smooth, uncracked – although mottled with an archipelago of
stains in the vicinity of the rose. So you see, they never told me
about Mary. She could tempt anything, even fate.

The ledge of the room's mantelpiece was sundered, part of it thickly
crumbled upon the lower hearth area whilst the other part – with
jagged edge – was still proud to the chimney breast. I merely
described its bald state to Mary, as if to palm it off as customary.
She was barely out of her teens, in those days.

"But," she asked, "is the mantlepiece the only bit of the room that
you quaintly call – what did you say? – broken?"

I had not been led to expect anything of Mary other than cold
objective logic. Indeed, I cannot recall ever being warned about her
at all. Despite her age, her maturity was unimpeachable. I didn't
know she had even been listening.

"No, Mary … as you can see," (and I tentatively circled my arm like a
compass pointer) "the floorboards have given way in several places …
and the mirror leans at more than 45 degrees from its wall … and the
window is twice as big and far more disjointed than it was when
originally built - if gaps such as windows *can* be built."

Mary laughed or, rather, gave a slight snicker.

My shaky pointer made its way *through* the said window. She
evidently found my jokes rather crude, although, that day, I felt
myself nearly witty enough for her steadily growing maturity.

"There, Mary," I persisted, "you will see even the washing-line is
broken."

"It's not. The washing is still hanging on it and the rope is
propped up by the wooden pole."

Her words, to my ears, were rather gawky if words can be gawky. I
shrugged off her response with my own: "The washing-line is broken
because something is missing from it."

"Do you mean there is a gap along it?" she piped, taking the wind
from my conversational sails.

I gave a brief nod.

Mary thought for no more than a beat, and then pursued her advantage.
"Let me make a prediction" she said, in a careful tone, but one which
betrayed supreme confidence: "The roof is broken, isn't it?"

"Yes" I replied, taken further by surprise, but somehow expecting this
consequence to our strange conversation. "Yes indeed, but how do you
know that?"

"Because the ceiling is whole. Everything else is broken or useless or
gapped, and a ceiling is no good without a roof above it. So; the roof
must be broken, and the ceiling is useless, even though it's not
broken."

"I'd say something that is useless is automatically broken," I
suggested. "Its meaning is broken."

Mary had indeed tempted fate. She had tempted me to skirt the
dreaded art of philosophy, even to enter full-bloodedly into its
realms of pretentious thought.

I was not an Estate Agent. Nor she a prospective client to purchase
property. We were just parts of a dialogue like Plato's Republic.
But why Mary had been chosen to face my own version of Socrates, I'm
sure even Plato could be pushed to answer. Most philosophical
dialogues, after all, were conducted by men, in my experience. Mary
was the arch temptress, far more the tempter than the male orientated
Serpent. She was perhaps Eve to my Adam – wielding the apple of
philosophy in the guise of knowledge. All this without the benefit
of being undressed.

Seeing her face again turn towards the gap that was disguised as a
window, I saw, too, that the washing-line writhed and wriggled from
makeshift prop to pippin tree.

"Shall we go outside?" said Mary, all innocence. "I bet we could fix
the washing-line. At least that would be a start."

"We can't go outside" I replied sternly. I knew why this was
important, but could feel the sand already pouring away from under
the moral foundations of any argument I might be able to come up
with. My words seemed to have lost all heft.

Mary was already edging away from me, as if I wouldn't notice. "But I
want to see what's missing - you know, from the line. I need to see
the gap - maybe you could fill it; with a knot?"

I couldn't undermine Mary's apparent need to tinker with this
delicately balanced environment, but her focus on that one
convoluting object brought its own tangent towards a return to the
status quo.

"You will never be able to See what is Missing, and a knot is not an
option, but in any case; I don't mind the gap," I replied, thinking
myself so clever. "Stand clear of those doors - move right down
inside, please..."

I had not been expecting anyone else to be in the house. I hadn't
been told about Mary. Pre-warning is pre-arming, they say. There
was a gap in my preparation for visiting the Broken House. She'd
already asked me to come outside to assess a gap. I somehow wished we
could go upstairs, to make the assessment there. The business of
philosophy, like the business of business itself (if I *had* been an
Estate Agent, which I wasn't), surely didn't often offer such
salacious prospects that this blue-stockinged lady called Mary
currently offered. The `Mind the Gap' joke was simply my way to
divert guilt from my own weakness in risking the mental acrobatics of
philosophy for the sake of more crudely physical ends. If I had been
told about Mary, I may have come up with a better pre-emptive method
than a silly joke.

I followed her – at an imposed loose end – into the garden. I
audibly hummed and hahed, as absent-minded as a professor of
philosophy I once knew for real.

While she inspected the washing-line, I took the spontaneous
opportunity to glance back at the roof. It was not exactly broken
but heavily weathered, with two ribbony strips of the deepest
discolouring like tearstains reaching down (across the cheap rough

tiles to the guttering) from a staring pair of dormer-windows.

I looked, to see Mary engaging with the ever elusive ends of the
washing line like a young puppy - reverting to the child she really
was underneath the artificial decking of all of those serious, spider-
web thoughts.

Turning back to the house, I became engrossed in the shifts created
by this new point of view. Ancient and deteriorating on the surface,
the structure seemed sound enough. The gap in the window seemed
invisible from the outside, and, peering into the darkness beyond,
the lame angle of the dangling mantlepiece seemed not so much broken,
but conglomerated into some kind of hideously ornate Corinthian
hearth.

Sundered from its function as a shelter, the roof no longer over our
heads seemed to have settled into its own survival mode. As we stood
outside under the open sky, I at once felt regret in the sensation
that the house would no longer admit our return, while my intuition
told me that, should we once again force ingress, the state of
dilapidation would reign once more. Fed up with pretentious arguments
and the prodding of Platonic property developers, the house was in
retirement, and had gently spat us out for the last time while red
clouds gathered beyond the trees in the garden.

Clouds are just the sky’s bleeding gaps, I thought. 

“You spend a lifetime wondering which cloud is the last cloud you

 will ever see,” Mary suddenly announced.

 And my dormers wept.  Red Sky at Night, Shepherd’s Delight, my

 mother often  used to say, when rocking me to sleep with her

 own body.  I was now so old, I couldn’t get back in.  Couldn’t

 get back to where I belonged.