Willowy, slight as one of the twigs bristling at the end of her nostalgically-fashioned broom, camouflaged against the day, she stood, sweeping. In her ears, as if straight into her conciousness, music played through tiny white earphones. Her hips swayed with the rhythm of music and sweeping, her eyes down-turned towards the sodden leaves that plastered the concrete. A black plastic sack rustled next to her, its crumpled surface rippling in the November breeze. It was a warm day, the first after two of wind and rain.

She did not see how it happened, heard only, above the sound of her earphones, the cry of surprise, the sharp scrape of metal on concrete: the sound of a bicycle losing its traction on the decaying leaves and throwing its rider to the floor. She looked up, pulled out her earphones, saw a student lying in the road, curled into the foetal position. She gasped, dropped her broom, ran towards him. There was no one else around. Already the student was picking himself up, assessing the damage. He wore an open chequered shirt over his t-shirt, the sleeve of which had been ripped by the fall.

“Oh you poor dear,” the woman exclaimed, seeing the blood running from his elbow, his knee, the side of his finger.

The student looked up at her, pale, shaken, saw a woman also pale, with freckles across her nose and straight, reddish-brown hair down past her shoulders, helping to move his bike off his leg. The cardigan she wore was tight around her thin arms. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“Did you hit your head?” she asked. “Do you need an ambulance?”

“No,” the student said slowly, stretching and contracting his limbs.

“Are you alright to stand?” the woman asked, helping him up. “Come inside, I’ve got a first aid box.” In the shock of the moment she had forgotten her usual shyness.

The student seemed about to protest but, looking down at the rent in his jeans and the blood seeping into the denim, allowed himself to be lead into the small front yard of the woman’s small terraced house. While he stood there, feeling awkward. a cold numbness that was worse and more mysterious than pain gnawing at his injuries, she went back to pick up his bike and bring it through the gate.

“I think the wheel’s gotten bent,” she said as she brought it through, but he had seen that before she said it. He frowned and she looked regretful as she opened the front door.

She lead him through a short hallway and asked him to take a seat in the living room while she went to fetch her medical box. He perched on the edge of a red settee and plucked a few tissues from a box on the low Ikea coffee table, nervous of dripping blood on the carpet or furniture. Through the window, the weak autumn sun, filtered by the remaining yellowed leaves on the nearest of the trees that lined this street, illuminated a silent sitting room that smelled faintly of furniture polish and pot pourri. In the corner near the window stood an inexpensive, though quite large, flat-screen television, in the opposite corner a tall lamp, in another corner, set into one of the alcoves either side of the fireplace, a bookshelf half filled with books and half with DVDs and a few old VHSs. The student did not have time to read the titles of many of these before the woman returned, holding a white plastic box, a beige towel, and a matching flannel that steamed in what the student now realised was the cold air of the room.

The woman sat down next to him, her knees together, turned towards him, the lower half of her legs bent away from him against the front of the sofa. She put the folded towel down on the cushion between them.

“Take your shirt off,” she instructed.

Self-consciously the student slid his arm out through the sleeve, lay the shirt down, bloodied side up, over the arm of the settee, allowed the woman to lift his arm with her slender cool fingers. The warm touch of the flannel against his elbow raised goose-pimples in the surrounding skin. When the woman had dabbed a few times and removed it, an uneven circle of the beige had been stained a watercolour-red. The woman looked up at his face.

“Sorry,” she said, “the house is always cold.”

The student smiled thinly, still looked concerned, said nothing as the woman dried the damp skin with a corner of the towel. This too absorbed some of the redness.

“Oh, don’t worry about these,” she said, “they’re old and I never use them anyway.”

With the blood gone they could both see that the injury was just a scrape; some torn and grazed skin. The woman reached in the box for a pack of sterile gauze padding, tore it open in a quick, neat motion.

“Do you live here alone?” the student asked as she pressed the gauze against his skin, reached for surgical tape and scissors.

She looked up again, surprised at the question, her fingers still clasped lightly around his arm.

“Yes,” she said.

The student thought he detected a sadness, a loneliness, in her eyes, but then felt that, no, it was not located there but seemed to hang permanently around her like a shroud, making her seem older than she was. He worried that the one thing he had said to her had been wrong, so he quickly said,

“Thanks for doing this. I don’t think we even have Elastoplasts at home.”

“Where do you live?”

“A few streets away, near the cemetery.”

The woman put her hand on his wrist and gently bent his arm. The student felt the tape pull tight against his skin, but it did not tear or come away.

“Shall I do your knee or your finger next?” she asked.

The student twisted his hand round to look at the side of his smallest finger. It ached when he flexed it, but did not seem badly cut or damaged.

“I don’t think my finger’s too bad,” he said.

The woman wiped it with another part of the flannel.

“No, it’s not too bad,” she said, “I have a small plaster if you’d like.”

“I think it’s stopped bleeding, it should be alright.”

The woman felt a strong urge to kiss the finger, or the back of his hand, but she resisted.

“Shall we look at your knee then?” she asked.

They both looked down at the bloody patch on the knee. The strangeness of the situation, of being suddenly in this woman’s house, tended by her, had begun to dissolve, but now he felt awkward again. She mustn’t kneel down in front of me, he felt.

“You don’t have to,” he said.

“I don’t mind.”

He guessed she was fifteen, at most twenty, years older than him. If she was twenty years older, that would make her twice his age. She seemed sort of faded, he thought, as if she had spent her life in autumn days; like a violet pressed between the pages of a book.

He bent forwards to pull and roll up his jeans. The friction of the denim, soft as it was from years of wear, rubbed against the cut, renewing its pain and smearing the inside of the material with a thin line of red. It would have been easier to just pull them down, but it would have been too awkward to sit there with this stranger in just his t-shirt and shorts.

“It doesn’t look as bad as your elbow,” she said, leaning forwards to inspect it, “bring it up here and I’ll put a pad on it.”

She moved the towel and patted the cushion next to her. He pulled off his shoe, brought his bare knee up next to her and held his shin with clasped hands. Their heads came close together and a curtain of her hair fell forwards, parallel with his knee. She reached up to tuck It behind her ear and continued to dab with the cooling flannel. Neither spoke nor looked at the other while she worked, only at the knee.

“All done.”

He ran his finger over the dressing, felt the strangeness of its unfeeling mass against his skin.

“Thank you,” he said, putting his foot back on the floor.

“It’s a shame about your jeans,” she said.

“Most of my jeans have holes in anyway.”

“Oh,” she said. The tone of the utterance expressed both concern and sympathy.

“I like them that way, in summer they’re cooler than shorts.”

There was a pause, a silence that stretched beyond the small living room, beyond the cold house, right down to either end of the street.

“Do you have any more injuries?” Her voice was quiet.

“I don’t think so, I suppose I –”

She reached up suddenly and stroked the side of his jaw, feeling beneath her fingers the soft stubble.

“Sorry,” she said, drawing her hand back.

He said nothing. She was looking at him, but he could not read her expression.

“You might stay a few minutes more,” she said, almost as a question, “wait a few minutes before you put a strain on the cuts.”

From his silence she assumed acquiescence, and reached up again, this time to his neck. He allowed himself to be pulled towards her, and downwards, until his head rested on her lap. He could see, sideways now, the coffee table, and beyond it the unlit fireplace, and before it the blurred horizon of her knees, and he could smell the scent of her dress; the faintest aroma of cotton and perfume and dust. On the lower shelf of the coffee table lay a DVD case with the title ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, and on the top of the coffee table was a paperback he had not noticed before, the underside, or topside, of its splayed pages facing him so that he could see neither its title nor author. The woman began to play with his hair, twisting its short tufts around her finger and then tracing winding patterns through the haphazard strands. She was not so very old, but she felt that she had lived here for a very long time.

“Do you read much?” she asked, “does anyone your age read any more?”

“I read,” he said, “but probably not as much as I should.”

His hands were down by his thighs, his fingers and thumbs moving and twisting against each other. He was tempted to reach up and run his hand along her calf, feel the plastic friction of her tights beneath his palm, reciprocate the familiar way with which she had touched the damaged parts of his body and now played with his hair, but he did not.

“In the book I’m reading,” she began, “a man and a woman make love, and start to fall in love, but the man does not like her hands. Her fingers are too short and fat and inelegant. He says they are ugly, calls them child’s hands. He thinks she’s beautiful, but he can’t help but focus on her hands. It’s a really big deal for him, so big that he calls off the relationship, though it’s not yet explained why it was such a big deal. I don’t know if it will be.”

Her voice was quiet, demure, yet passionate and honest. He could imagine, as he lay there, the warmth of her lap rising up through his cheek, her reading a bed-time story to a child.

“Later on, years later” she continued, “the man finds the woman all wasted in a street in Milan. He broke her heart, ruined her, and she turned to drugs and prostitution. Her skin is all grey , her face is drawn, her eyes are dull; he can’t see the spark of life and love that once was there, only a murky cloud of despair. He’s moved to tears as he kneels down in front of her, and she seems only dimly to recognise him, but he takes her hands and holds them and apologises to her. Then he realises that her hands haven’t changed, they’re still just the same, as he remembered them, and now he thinks they’re beautiful. He kisses them and falls in love with them, and with her, and promises he’ll look after her.”

Outside, the sun had disappeared beyond the roofs of the houses opposite and the breeze had become stiffer, causing the black bag with leaves in it to shudder and crinkle loudly.

“That’s as far as I’ve got,” the woman finished, apologetically. “I suppose it sounds trashy.”

A car drove by the house, its tires creating a wet, sticky sound as they rolled over the fallen leaves.

“I’ve always thought I have nice hands, that they’re my best feature. I used to be able to play the piano.”

In the stress she put on the I, there seemed implicit the statement that no one else had ever said so. The student felt that he should reach up and enclose her fingers within his own and tell her that she did have nice, soft, delicate, feminine hands, but instead he was thinking about something else:

“The other day,” he said, “there was this insect on the glass of our back door, which is the one we use to come in and go out by. I think it was some sort of grasshopper, but it might have been a cricket. It was brilliantly, intensely green. It had long elegant legs. I was a little afraid of it. I wondered what it was doing there, and especially at this time of year, but then I closed the door and thought no more about it.”

He could feel the woman’s eyes on him, but did not turn to look. Her hand was now still, fingers curled against the bone behind his ear.

“The next day I noticed it lying on the doormat inside our kitchen. Someone had trodden on it and it was squashed into the material, its long legs sticking out pathetically. Over the following couple of days I noticed it getting more and more trodden in, and soon it had lost its bright green and become brown with dirt. I don’t suppose anyone else noticed it, or they just ignored it. It’s still there now, looking just the same as a piece of chewing gum stuck to a pavement.”

His words trailed into silence, and then he suddenly sat up and looked at his watch. His hair was flattened on the side he had been lying on, but stuck out where the woman had been playing with it.

“I’d better go,” he said, “I was supposed to have been at my girlfriend’s house by now.”

He pulled his shoe back on. The spell of spontaneous intimacy had been broken. Now he stood, and the woman escorted him to the door, watched as he wheeled his bicycled out the front gate. There was grating sound as the distorted part of the wheel passed the break pads, but the sound was only slight. He mounted the saddle.

“You be careful,” the woman warned.

“Thank you,” the student said.

Their final look into each other’s faces was brief. Twilight suited her, he thought, and she was quite beautiful. He pushed down on his pedal, lifted his other foot from the ground, and began a cautious journey along the pavement. The woman watched him until he disappeared at the end of the street, and then fetched in her broom and dropped the half-empty black bag into the bin. She realised, as she went back into the living room to retrieve the towel and the flannel and her white medical box and switch on a light, that she had never asked his name, nor given hers, but felt that somehow it was better that way. As she bent to pick up the towel she noticed on the coffee-table, next to the tissue box, a few crumpled blood-stained tissues; his blood, discarded like leaves from a tree.

Tags: autumn, bicycles, boy meets girl, Fiction, injury, leaves, Relationships, student

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.