The Last Balcony

The three of us in the room, William, Charles and Lucy, were so accustomed to our own company, in the context of these walls and the wide window, that we took ourselves for granted.

It seems strange to call myself by one of our three names ... as if I were just another protagonist beyond my own control.

The room was unlit except for any sky travelling through the window. Therefore, during the winter, we did not spend so much time together in there. The silence remained restful, but it was a more significantly enveloping silence, I felt, when accompanied by darkness. Yet we were not allowed much time in the darkness ... unless they forgot, as they sometimes did, that we were still in the room.

Who were those others determining our comings and goings? They were clear by face, manner and speech, but not by name. We were the only ones with names.

Most of the others were quite ordinary, revealing the minimum of their selves, but we later suspected – or, at least, I did – that they had even less depth than we at first assumed. There was no point in trying to discuss with them the finer points of Art and Philosophy. Charles once tested them with various topics but the topics came back to him unconsidered and thinner. William tossed less demanding topics into the melting pot, observations on imaginary sports and idealised TV programmes for the masses. They came back to him slightly considered, it is true, but even shallower than they were when they went out. William was then given the responsibility of trying out specific topics like Ethnic Cleansing or Ceramics. Such topics failed to come back at all.

Lucy did not bother with any of this. She simply kept her own counsel, between arranging the occasions when William would be sent to the window (and beyond) to wave. That happened about once a week.

***
The old man looked up from the book. He was decidedly bored with plots that had inscrutable people in an even more inscrutable room for apparently no reason. Such weird mysteries were wearing thin.

There came a knock on the door.

“I haven’t finished this one,” he said, when he saw that his carer had brought another book for him to read.

“Put it by. It will keep.”

The carer was a young man hardly into facial hair. He was not dissimilar, the old man thought, to the man he had once been. Now, the old man was dependant on these versions of a younger self so as simply to survive his own body’s fighting back at the life he had once given it.

“Put it by. It will keep.”

The old man repeated the young man’s words. The words sounded too old for such a very young man to use, simple though those words were. It was the order and tone of the words that seemed strange. It would be difficult for a book not to 'keep', short of destroying it on purpose or throwing it out of the window or simply losing it by some other means. But, in the old man’s nearly bare room, it was difficult to lose anything, although he often managed to do so. Throwing a book out of the window – the easiest method of ‘losing’ it – did not work as well as it should, mainly because it fell on the floor of the balcony just the other side of the window.

The old man sighed and, as the carer left, he returned to the book he was now somehow even more determined to finish.

***
It was the day William was due to open the window and venture forth to wave. From where we sat in the gloom, we could see it was the bluest sky possible outside, so blue it probably needed no sun to supplement its light-giving properties.

Lucy straightened William’s tie within the swan’s nest of his collar. Charles, struggling without a mirror, tried to straighten his own tie – evidently dismayed that he was only the understudy for waving.

I could already hear the crowds building up outside in the vast City Square. The cheering swelled with the expiry of every minute between William standing up and moving slowly towards the window. One of the others was already opening the window that was indeed tall as well as wide. French, they used to call it, until when someone pointed out that it couldn’t be French unless it was on the ground floor. A double-window was nearer the truth.

The surge of light and sound that the opened window allowed to penetrate into our room ever made us flinch.

Even though we expected it, the surprise was never a small one.

We watched, that is, Lucy and Charles watched, as the back of William’s slender silhouette moved bodily, as it were, into the light and sound – stepping over the high threshold, beyond the embrasure, until he could look down from what we had always assumed to be a balcony.

Once he had politely acknowledged the crowd’s presence below him in the Square, they would disperse, judging by the sounds they made. Today, not for the first time, we imagined that they may be disappointed that no words had been uttered from the balcony to accompany the waving.

William turned back through the window into our room ... tears in his eyes.

This was not unusual. He never told us why the occasion was so sad. The attendant had by now closed the window, both light and sound sucked back into a dusk that was regularly timed to follow the end of his waving.

We dabbed William’s eyes with our handkerchiefs. It was still a moment of ceremony, while he remained outside of our ‘ourness’. Soon we would be escorted from the room by the others ... if they remembered.

***
The old man closed the book. He had reached its end, he thought. He threw it out onto the balcony, his window having been left open because it was still a relatively mild time of year. He expected to hear the sound as it clumped on the narrow floor outside ... yet this time he threw it with more vigour than normal, as if in one final battle against his own body.

And there was no clump. Just the sound of many distant feet on cobbles rushing – otherwise silently – to where it had fallen.

***
As we continued to dab his eyes in the encroaching darkness, we intoned the words:

"No force on earth can shake us!"



written today and first published here