The chestnut tree

I look back over what I've written and I know it's wrong, not because of what I've set down, but because of what I've omitted. What isn't there has a presence, like the absence of light.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labelled bones.

Last night I woke abruptly, my heart pounding. From the window there was a clinking sound: someone was throwing pebbles against the glass. I climbed out of bed and groped my way towards the window, and raised the sash higher and leaned out. I didn't have my glasses on, but I could see well enough. There was the moon, almost full, spider-veined with old scars, and below it the ambient sub-orange glow cast up into the sky by the street lights. Beneath me was the sidewalk, patchy with shadow and partially hidden by the chestnut tree in the front yard.

I was aware that there shouldn't be a chestnut tree there: that tree belonged elsewhere, a hundred miles away, outside the house where I had once lived with Richard. Yet mere it was, the tree, its branches spread out like a hard thick net, its white-moth flowers glimmering faintly.

The glassy clinking came again. There was a shape there, bending over: a man, foraging in the garbage cans, shuffling the wine bottles in the desperate hope that there might be something left in one of them. A street drunk, impelled by emptiness and thirst. His movements were stealthy, invasive, as if he was not hunting, but spying-sifting through my discarded trash for evidence against me.

Then he straightened and moved sideways into the fuller light, and looked up. I could see the dark eyebrows, the hollows of the eye sockets, the smile a white slash across the dark oval of his face. At the V below his throat there was pallor: a shirt. He lifted his hand, moved it to the side. A wave of greeting, or else departure.

Now he was walking away, and I couldn't call after him. He knew I couldn't call. Now he was gone.

I felt a choking pressure around the heart. No, no, no, no, said a voice. Tears were running down my face.

But I'd said that out loud-too loudly, because Richard was awake now. He was standing right behind me. He was about to put his hand on my neck.

This was when I woke up really. I lay with my wet face, eyes open, staring at the grey blank of the ceiling, waiting for my heart to slow down. I don't cry often any more, when awake; only a few dry tears now and then. It's a surprise to find I've been doing it.

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too-leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

There really was a clinking sound, glass against glass. I climbed out of bed-out of my real, single bed-and made my way over to the window. Two raccoons were pawing through the neighbours' Blue Box across the street, turning over the bottles and cans. Scavengers, at home in the junkyard. They looked up at me, alert, unalarmed, their small thieves' masks black in the moonlight.

Good luck to you, I thought. Take what you can, while you can get it. Who cares if it belongs to you? Just don't get caught.

I went back to bed and lay in the heavy darkness, listening to the sound of breathing I knew was not there.