The Proscenium of Dispossession

First published 'Connections' 1999


"I have a washing-machine with several programmes but I only ever use one of them," she said aloud. The statement was crazy, she feared. There was no possible excuse for it.

She spoke to nobody. The house was semi-detached, the room was dark, the clock ticked ponderously - the window faded into dusk. Sadie was Sadie. Sadie, sadly, was not happy.

Loneliness had dogged Sadie for most of her life but, tonight, it used the brute force of silence to deepen a dark grip. Yet, paradoxically, the silence was so there, so up-front, so damn tangible, it actually kept her company. Never before it had held sway like a nothing so nothing it was something.

It conjured up another person sitting slightly opposite swathed in shadows, shadows which would have ceased to be shadows had there not been a sense of casting about for a slippery customer on that side of the room to intervene between the light and the blackness.

"I'm going to the circus tomorrow," said Sadie to this halfway house of existence.

She was not going to the circus, of course. Not in the foreseeable future, anyway. Even less likely in any unforeseen version, either. It was what had sprung to mind - bounced into her head unbidden and barely understood. The context was a series of non-sequiturs that sluggishly spread outward from the single churning thought of a washing-machine.

She leaned back and forth on her stool. The space at which she spoke was just that, a gap between ears, the wings of an armchair, the only shape that her imagination could turn back into any sort of reconcilable reality. She strained to summon up the only cure for loneliness. Satisfaction with oneself. Inner completeness. Outer composure.

"I love the clowns. But I love the seals better in the circus as they bob a ball and pop it back and forth to each other." Sadie's voice was projected through frogs and swallows as if an actress were preening her one and only stage presence against the onset of decrepitude.

The last time she had visited a circus was as a young princess dolled up by her favourite uncle for taking to the pantomime one night and the big top the next. Spinning memories that a fading childhood cast upon her home's flimsy connecting wall. Twirling away into the mists of some collective senility that few escaped.

"On one occasion, a seal clapped loudly and fell off its stool," she muttered in the undertones of her erstwhile uncle. She felt good. She had recovered from a bad dose of consecutive non-sequiturs. Could she be on the mend? Perhaps she had reached beyond the curtain that old age had threatened to draw across her sense of self. Upstaging the recent years of illness by playing an abruptly remembered part she'd once prepared (albeit parrot-fashion) for such a dim and distant emergency as this.

That business of the hilariously clumsy seal marked a particular time she'd returned from the circus - mind still full of gaudiness - to discover a house in mourning. One of her baby sisters had died unexpectedly. In those olden days, it seemed, children and babies were born more easily and died more easily, too.

Sadie wept, in sudden outward sympathy with herself. She swayed more deeply. The stool toppled and fell to the floor to the sound of silent applause. The washing-machine next door had abruptly begun the noisy spinning part of its programme.

And the silence slowly retreated.