From the linen dresses and satin ones there was something hurtful to intuit, their wrinkled surfaces, the limp scallops that had lost shape, the general rumpled galaxy made out of those off-starch pleats, those shaken off from the whole tangled turmoil heaped in the hamper then smoothed out, flapped onto that clothesline, caught in dotage of the pale morning sun.

Everything jarred, the drabs and drolls that had to be moped through at this pre-lunch hour, this bland scene of March – bare black branches in the fore, the line of soughing camphor trees sentineling the still yellowish turf blurred into tremory glissando against the dappled white of the sky – streamed through in a slash, and then the thickish velvet wrinkles of the curtains, unmoving and unmoved by any stare, while the hands of all clocks rushed on in infinitestimal notches and in circles.

She pillowed her forehead on her forearm, seesawing on the curve of the brow in violent tumbles to crush out the nibbling insects of ache. But the pain was that much akin to a lifebuoy, skittering to presses and would stay above water level regardless.

It had taken on a desolate slant because she was supposed to be a silhoutte in bower of glass roofs, with alternate shards of light and shades of foliage flecking her book pages. So she stopped the nuzzling and poised the weight of her head on one cheek, leaning against the desk with her back to the window, knowing that outside, the Muse was still stooping and straightening, following the stretch of string, loading it with skirts and corsages and had to pick up the basket and carry it a bit forward along with her steps for what remained. The Muse would be there, occupied by the chore for a good while till this lecture ended or else in the blear her eyes shut again. It appeared to her a wicked thing to see and to have to see, to recognise from a scrap of blind the necessity of laundry even for Woolf.

She stood to push the glass agape. The ingest of breeze bated the drape and sent in rosy scents of soap. Under plate of the sallow rays the Muse’s liveries swayed.

The frills skirting the trims of her chiffon blouse waver as the ammonia settles again to nullify the aroma flailed back from her extended fingers. She must have thought about this, envisioned, turning back from the chrome-coloured balm quilling the solarium something ticks inside her and informs of a radix. At the bedstand she halts and looks into the finished plate of biscuits, at those crumbs greasing the doily or else drizzling the grey plastic plane of the table. She has thought about flowers but could not decide which kind – though that was all before passing by the florists’ without entering any – and now the white filigreed vase bludgeons her sight. She draws in the wilted pungency of the baby’s breathes inside, having been accustomed to that of the disinfectant. All of the buds looks long shrivelled into those fists above dark brittle stalks.

She walks out onto the frosted vinyl blue of the corridor, on the bounce of which her paces tap out no sound and that no-sound splits her steps into more ginger measures. For a moment there flickers past her mind this outlandish impetus to look down and check, as it suddenly eludes her, together with those absent sounds, which of the plimsolls she has on, or really has she any.

But there are those posters plastering the wall to see, intumesced organs and varicosed epidermis turned over to exposure. Verbose tips on health and the importance of its maintenance. Styrofoam boards scaled with emoji-quantified rates, for descriptions of pain. Down the way a woman clanks through a bunch of keys while shuffling knot-kneed trying the doors. When the targeted one cranks open it is hastily slammed. At the sound she frowns.

She comes back in with the scent of rose strengthened on fingers and round the wrists. The sweet smell of that sanitizer on the washroom’s sink, not those blue-bottled antiseptic nailed beside the doors.

He is in a chequered wheelchair with kempt canvas, in the harlequin red and indigo that relates to her some damp days and dripping umbrellas. She has never seen him with one, and it is not because their presences never crisscrossed in rain. Now she wonders which kind of umbrella he would hold, those with straight shafts or retractable; whether he would shake off the wet and where, then, it would be placed, blacony or washroom, its canopy sprawling or swathed. It is none of her business anymore. It has never been.

He seems dozed off, which suits her, as after all she hasn’t anything to say. He looks shrunken, sunk in the wheelchair and unmoving, measuring lower than the mattress. The height of herself against his embarrasses. She wants to too shut her lids or else stoop to subtract from the distinction, and chooses the latter to study his features, the capillaries lacing his sockets that are yellow and bold-folded, flabby and drawn in, the dandruffs covering the towel spanning his shoulders, the vellumy skin coating the clots of white and red above the spindly phalanges, the scoured sheen on the shins uncovered by the cuffs of the striped slacks, the ring of chapped, bluff scratches round the lips. She studies all that and wants to take back the days that he has mugged off her.

He doesn’t wake. She looks out again from the gingham blinds that has been blown to shield the window and the handled side of the glazed door. A garden, looking half-finished because of the jagged design of sooty bricks, like an abandoned project of constrution; an attraction, a site, where windmills stacking on cloistered ponds, the crude mimicry of art. She gazes, from the unshaded half of the pane and through the barren solarium, at the arabesque of light gleaming the shingled rooftops outside that infest her nostrils with a faint, vicarious linger of formaldehyde, at the pink buds of plum blossoms against the slates patching the enclosure. Her body turns to them with the movement of her face.

So it is at her back that he stirs, a click and a trickle of faint rustles that picture before her eyes a drop of the propping elbow that dips the head, and then the shirtback’s scuff on grains of canvas when straightening the spine, a knead with his heels on the eyes. He coughs at her presence, one of the polite, hissy collection that he once doled out walking by anyone whom he vaguely knew.

In vertigo she turns, her sight occupied by the verdant palimpsests of those she has been staring out at. He sees her cladded in the blaze, backlighted, something black and hazy with a fuzzy frame, while she extracts from his eyes the purblindness, its source she cannot pin down to light or time.

‘Sit, sit,’ he gestures to the jasper surface of the leather recliner, whose centre is punched, already, readily, with the annular curls of a dent. She has a vague feeling that he would have patted the place intended or, even, her shoulder, had he been able to reach either. He is so aged that one thing or another has changed.

She smiles and falters, intending a bashful decline. She could say that something’s there ahead waiting to be taken care of, that she cannot stay very long, though she very much wants to. But again it stabs at her, the fact that she has to look down to look him in the eye, in the face.

She sits on the unpleated edge of the recliner, the platter holding the dregs of biscuits ascends to eye level. She twizzles the brim of the paper cup he bids her to fill. Her shadow darkened the water as it leveled up. The leaves of tea have assumed, in the shade, the buoyancy of little vacuous corpses to some water plate. They now mutate the buds on her tongue into bitter, smarting nits that would set off into substantiality at any next intake of water, the way he had filled her so, that she almost thought, like him to her, she was too the only one in his life.

The pitcher stands at the other side of the plate, arm-length from her temple. She reaches out and rounds its grip into grasp with a lift of the shoulder. Then she has to stand up. She fills the mug and hands it to him, fits it into his lax clench. Their hands connect. The long white fingers slip past and she feels the powdery, papery texture of them. They are at the same time sleek as a child’s, or a woman’s.

He starts to blow on the flat of his tea, his lashes flicker from the spiraling heat.

‘I—’ settling down the pitcher she voices, determined. But weirdly it comes out in a husk. He stops puffing.

‘I liked you.’ It occurs as an intonation without intonation. She feels the need of explanation. ‘I used to like you, when.’ She doesn’t know how or what else to say. He would correct her, she thinks and remembers how he hated broken sentences, sentences that lack grammar, phrases studded with misspellings or else ill-picked words. Would that bit change, has it, changed? she thinks promptly and adds: ‘I like you.’

Without confusion he smiles. It is almost a grin. He wheels himself to the bedstand and sets down the mug, the hand relieved stays beside the cup.

‘Thank you for liking me.’

She is siezed with an urge of beetling off, or tossing her head. Now they are on the two converging sides of the square, his back against the bed and hers against the wall at its headboard, only she has not sat back onto the chair, so that, and so, does not have to stand up again.

For a moment she glances into his eyes, tipping her lids down to do so with something rising in her heart, teeming and brimming. Perhaps he knows; he knew and has all the time known. Maybe, what if, he is all the time as sobre as her, lucid to the fact that because of this lucidity nothing crazy would be done, no intrepid stride taken?

She has not a clue, to how and what to reply.

But she is no longer looking at him. Her neck is giving her this little sore and she steers away from him. The sun has veered to the other side of the building; the giddiness has palliated. Her ears feel wadded and there is on her palate the prescience of a yawn. He was the one who shift from this field to that. He has been the one despot sliding his jurisdiction over all slivers of land that interest him any slightest bit. Now he is hooped and coddled here, and probably one day his demise will come, here, and sooner even than hers. Hers with no one visiting and with, ideally, no one noticing. Hers with conation, and in that case, finally, she would win. But very much sooner his will be, and then another of the ambiguous valedictions that, now that she is here, witnessing his decrepitude, cannot be deemed serious, not the least final. She had lost him once, so a reunion does not seem real, so a next would not be the least bit anguishing. The laminate has been protracted, its worth halved.

She doesn’t know how to stretch on so pads off to the door. She fathoms, speculates. She parts the curtains, pushes out, and dives into the tepidity of the solarium. Those days are incapable of reimbursement. She has not come for any, despite this edge on her age – compared with that her face looks even fresher – that allows recklessness regardless of reason and ramification. She did not and won’t, as it isn’t even possible now.

She touches the paneled window. The beams are so overpowering that nothing is reflected. His eyes’ impression is becoming vague and she feels ready for something impending. She knows it is but an easy, pleasant illusion. Anyway she retracts the fingers: their tips in contact with the glass has started to sear. She turns back to face the bed.

But it is late again. In this all time has passed and nothing ever could be retrieved. The conversation has been broken, snapped off, staunched from its flow; it never was one from the start. He has looked away and looking fretted as it must have been too long waiting in the chair for bed. The pouches beneath his eyes has darkened and bloated. He is enervated from that sentence, those formalities. The silence is like this that she can perceive the blood inside her ears thudding in circulation, the sibilance of those downs stirred into minor motions.

Outside a rumble commences, rolling near in crescendo and setting her to dread a view of more, of his family or friends.

But did you know? Did you know and left because of that knowledge?

Once mulling this clearcut she knows. She knows she would not spit this out and why it is no longer possible. She does not want to know. Suddenly she does not even like him, and that not-liking him has nothing to do with familiarity. She just does not like him now. Cannot bring herself to. And not because of his dilapidation, which could have added to the affinity.

He farts as another, almost identical wheelchair appears at the door. A nuke invigorating enough for everyone present to skid their pupils away from each other to either snick or scowl. The woman rigs the girl in. With the woman helping and white stripes instead of red hers is made to assume more the complexion of a sail.

‘Bad manner, Mister.’ At the sound the girl titters, cupping one hand over her lips.

‘My apologies,’ He twinkles, curtseying with his arms arched and a draw-in of the chest. ‘Not gonna happen a next time.’

‘And the smell,’ the woman lours, fanning and slapping the air, both for herself and the girl. But then she poses a smile at her. ‘You mustn’t mind him, miss. His guts has taken on this slack and it is always the smell of what he has just ate.’

‘Eaten.’ He rectifies, his tongue flips out and recoils in saurian swiftness. He grins. She breathes in the faint linger of saccharined tomato and feels repulsed from reasons other than the odour. She feels marginally dotty.

‘I’ll open the door and those windows.’ The woman says in a charged tonality, hefting the girl into the sheets.

But she did not close them when coming in from the solarium, and now the curtains belly as a breeze breaks in. A glow presses on them from the mellowness outside, cleft into strands at the folds. She says: ‘Let me, please.’

She winds to them. She gathers them in a bouquet and clinches the band. As she lets go they plunge in two weighty braids. The woman leaves with a dripping steely basin without anymore adressing any of them. It seems sudden. The metal glitters in her eyes as she spins back on her feet. She thinks she has nothing to say. She thinks there is nothing to say and nothing would be exchanged. She thinks she would just go out.

With extreme abruptness he asks: ‘How’s that quiz? The one you were assigned last week. You all are presumed to hand back the papers revised but has up till now not.’

She looks at him, her lips parted. He has been aided into his bed now, reposing on his back. She feels that she see the colour of his retina even at this distance. She feels the colour. She feels the girl asleep, and then she feels the girl not there. It has always been her fallibility, any morsel of similitude between them. The hue and expression of the eyes. Any anthropic resemblance. To like someone and then picture them the way she is. As if though they don’t like her they are like her.

Her fingertips are cool. This time he will be obeyed no more. She would not execute it the minute anything plops out from his mouth, from him. This time she will stop. She would. She would, and automatically, without him instructing or implying. Yet what is there in this refrain? What if this abstinence itself is but an adherence to him, to the man anemic today but whose past influence has been elasticised so, that she does not, no longer, need to be directed to renunciation, just so that in the end she could say that she has, in her procedure, surpassed them all, outgrowing always the traps of entrapment, that, on the other hand when there is always an other, she could be like him, she could become him if unequal to get him.

After all she has something to say. She drops her gaze and the same instant her eyes rivet to his trainers that stand at the foot of the bed neat and snug, smug, even, spruce – bleached, tongue-smoothed, tips pointing doorwise. They seem ready to step out and go. Any minute now.

‘Well but it’s a good day,’ she says to him, she thinks she says to him; she thinks the girl has somehow gone out. She pores over the words, every word, to ensure a wholesome preciseness. She heeds the number of the crucial word, the indicator of information, theme. But she is so placid that nothing, regrettably, nothing could be shown on her face, with her face. ‘It’s a good day at least, for laundry.’

The gaze was let loose, defocused on the scratched vamps that situated closest to her desk. There was this no-good dejection, a biliousness gnating behind the eyes, either issuing from her failure to remember anything clearly or it was itself the miscreant that glitched her recollection of the thing happened, and left there only a scrappy discomfiture, an apprehension that there should have been something more, that something more could have been done. What she could not think of. It felt like nothing but a ripple that was very likely going to stay forever, yet a ripple on something solid and unduanted, and by no means a dint. It came, this wee sense of loss, not even strong as the sense of surprise when her eyes weaned from tacking on their own accords and she found herself snoozed off without being noticed by anyone.

The tirade in the front rambled on and swelled her head. Her mind fluttered at the pointlessness of it all. She wondered how come even time was a slaver in this plot, how it adopted itself this rate here and another when she set down her mind to leave behind something good, something that the successors, reincarnations, well, his reincarnation – as she could not believe one of herself, and as there was a supposed parallel between this dimension of the samsara and another, that of hers amid, had it the fluke of coming across his, would still age this much younger than his, and thereof would not be seriously treated – his jejune reincarnation, the kid, would read as a classic.

She ventured her gaze through the ground outside. For a moment the beams were dazzling, charging her eyes with squiggly white flakes. But very soon she was assured. There was the Muse, now piqued by the wind, biting her nails and running to fadeout after a ribboned boater, the hem of her dress drabbled with mud and frayed by gravels, some wisps of hair laddered from the plait and flew up over her face. It was a very pale face indeed, angular at the chin, at that last glimpse.

Others had always been passing her by, even when it was with equal reluctance that she inched out among them in jagged, unnecessary queues, along the paves then debouched into the now indubitable sunlight. At these undemanding times her mind could be allowed to meander as a pure form of retreat, slouching to those bare branches and their shadows crayoned on the cement that cast solider than any one of theirs, when the whole phalanx of them had a same muzzy ebony that looked frailly transluscent. Same heights, same movements, that was with the shadows they dragged underfoot. She thought about it when actually she couldn’t, her mind kept slipping in the languid tempo of some saraband: would I be someone else when the shadow of mine projects itself – piling itself – onto others’, or would they be me? Definitely something had transferred, then perhaps transmuted, this one thing is sure. But what was it and where to? In fear her eyes swept around, fixing on those ahead of her and those behind. The thought raided her that there must have been many before her and many after – even more after her, the whole of the infinitude. He could not save her from herself. All here, now, were her competitors.

She was left hard-pressed, passed off again and slammed out. But it could not be. It could not simply be like this. This she chanted over and over, as in the wash of crowds the clothes powdered off into sandy pixels, and the rope took wing.