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The Opaity - by Robert Nield
‘Any way you lie
You have pissed your life’ – William Carlos Williams
‘Fac tibi proponas mortem non esse timendam
quae bona si non est, finis tamen illa malorum est’ – Dicta Catonis
The glass of wine is heavy in his hand; the bath is warm. The candles he’d so delicately matched cast a soft light, mottling with the matching shadows in that wonderful blend – not too bright, not too bright and gaudy and not too dark, too murky – a simply wonderful, gentle reddened glow to illuminate the understated class he felt his life should have. He inhales the steam, breathes lavender and views with that warm sense of achievement a man can only share with himself his model sepulchre. It is nothing flashy, not vulgar but it is very special. The towels are neatly folded and the police will find his body in a few hours; comfortable in a warm bath, then in a cold box.
Eyelids flicker. His eyelids... the walls... bend; his hand shakes. He feels, in acute agonising detail the temperature dropping by degrees too small for senses; he hears (above some faintly somehow perfect Mendelssohn) the jarring dissonance of a droplet in the sink and another – his own placid pool disturbed, soiled. The surface, the whole surface, ripples with uncontrolled tension. Condensation on the ceiling drips liquid, insufferable. The candles flicker and god his hand drops, red wine stains the troubled surface of the bath. The glass is light; empty.
Breath comes in, swells his body tumescent with early middle age; scattering bubbles, breath comes out; strained breath shakes an empty, lined hand. The glass slipped into the water, is inundated, overspills, drowns. He hadn’t drunk, he never had, and old age, Saturnine, smiling, dribbling old age will lead him by the hand like a patronising old friend, to his comfortable, empty bed. An ugly mask holds his fleshy face in. Cliché holds his language, buries him alive with a thousand dead metaphors.
His eyes stare through a transparent glass from a face drained of colour, and he sees the nightlight through a half empty vodka bottle. He’d drunk. The thin light is distorted by thick glass, blurred by alcohol, exhaustion, everything but in the night it is clear and vivid. He fixes drunken eyes on it and an opaque night hangs over him.
Sleep comes; late again. Wakefulness will come too early.
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