Elizabeth Guilt lives in London, United Kingdom, where history lurks alongside plate glass office buildings and stories spring out of the street names. Her fiction has appeared most recently in Flash Fiction Magazine, Electric Spec and The Colored Lens. You can find her at www.elizabethguilt.com, or on Twitter as @elizabethguilt.
The envelope was thin and cheap, and the ball-point address spoke of no-nonsense admin. As I picked it up, something cold and heavy slid from one end to the other.
I turned the envelope over: no sender’s name. I held it up to the light and tried to guess what it was. A hand-addressed envelope is a rare treasure, even a rough and grubby-looking one.
Inside was a single Yale key and a piece of lined paper, its top splayed and ragged where it had been torn from a notebook.
Dear Adrian
The black writing was straggly, and already sloping downhill.
The doctors say I don’t have long, a couple of days.
Please get my box out of my flat. There’s no one else I trust.
By the end, the letters were so weak and slack it was hard to read. The lines fell away to the right as if the writer was winding down like broken clockwork.
It was signed with a scribble that could have been anything. I knew it was an M.
At the bottom, a loose scrawl added Take… Slowly? I stared at it, until understanding stabbed me: Take Shelly.
I put the key in my pocket and the note on the table. With each breath, I tried to concentrate on the solid bulk of my chest rising and falling, but nothing felt real any more. I turned abruptly and walked back to the Tube station.
As the carriage jolted me from side to side, I stared at the window, checking my reflection for expressions. Occasionally I flexed my fingers, watching them clench and unclench, trying to ground myself. Nothing pierced the numbness that had settled the moment I saw that key again.
I took out the little piece of metal, now warm from my pocket. It had no identifying marks, but I was sure it was mine. There were no signs of it having been flung angrily across a room two years ago. In those two years its owner had failed to find someone more trustworthy than the boyfriend who’d ended their acrimonious, dysfunctional relationship by walking out and cutting off all contact.
“A couple of days”. How long ago had Mark written that? How long before brisk efficiency – a nurse? – had added the address and taken it to a post box. A couple of days wasn’t long, and yet so much longer than I might have expected. Mark had been forever missing appointments, playing fast and loose with his antiretrovirals and always getting ill. I’d been meticulous, and was still fit and well. It had caused some of our more horrible arguments.
I wished I’d brought the note with me, even though I could probably repeat it word for word. The train stopped, and I walked up to ground level. My legs followed the route without my needing to think: fifteen minutes through the familiar streets, up the ugly, creaking metal staircase. My hands fitted the key, automatically lifting it a little to the left to compensate for the sticking lock. The door swung open on the dark passageway, crushing a pile of post against the wall.
I clicked the light switch, feeling only a wry amusement when the passage stayed dark. In the light from my phone, I noticed how many of the envelopes had red fronts.
I ignored the unmade bed and picked my way carefully into the main room, walking over the discarded T-shirts on the floor. The wooden wardrobe stood open, its rails and shelves almost bare. I reached into the base, pulling out the wooden chest.
“Everything I really care about, everything that’s irreplaceable, all in one place,” Mark used to say. “I’ll know what to grab in a fire.”
There would be nothing of value in it. Mark was always supremely careless of possessions. The box contained photos, diaries, letters from old lovers. I dreaded opening it.
Mark’s parents would see the contents as unutterably sordid, they hated their son’s life. But I wasn’t taking the chest away to spare them the pain; finding it would have served them right. It was Mark I wanted to protect, taking his secrets away so that no fastidious fingers could poke and pry into his life and loves. I guess I no longer hated him as much as I’d thought.
I dumped the box in the hall. The final room was tiny, and I expected it to be crammed. Instead, the metal arms of the guitar stands clutched at the air, like skeletons of Mark’s dreams. Only Shelly remained, splendid in the almost-empty room, my torchlight bouncing back brightly from her tortoiseshell inlay. Mark’s initials twined lovingly among the frets, and it seemed cruel to muffle the shining instrument in the darkness of the case.
Mark’s other guitars never had names, just Shelly. He used the others – for practice, for gigs – but he loved Shelly. She’d been handmade for him by a man in Oxfordshire, back in the days when Mark was dealing coke and rolling in money. Even to someone whose initials weren’t MGC she’d be worth more than all the others put together, and yet even with the red bills piling up he’d kept her. Perhaps in his hypothetical fire he would have found the chest wasn’t enough.
I wondered whether he’d still written songs with Shelly as he got weaker and the electricity went off. I could almost see him sitting on the bed against the wall, eyes closed and Shelly in his lap. Would he have looked like someone close to death? Had he lost weight, lost his hair, or developed skin lesions? Did he shiver as the radiators cooled?
I shook my head, trying to push the thoughts away. I picked up the guitar, slung the case over my shoulder, and lifted the box. The drifts of fallen post, crumpled against the door, showed someone had been in. Should I kick them back, try and hide my visit? maybe even clean my fingerprints from the light switch? I shrugged and walked out into the night.
The wooden chest was heavier than I’d imagined, and began to drag at my arms. I turned onto the main street, Mark’s box a deadweight echo of all the amplifiers I’d helped carry up and down this road.
I passed the bar – now decorated in chi-chi pale greens and selling overpriced cocktails – where I first heard Mark sing. It had been dark and damp, back then, but the shape of the doorway was the same.
He’d played so many bars round here. I reached another, which still had a battered blackboard advertising Friday’s bands. I’d humped gear up that staircase, and seen the guy who played bass sprawl drunkenly back down it later. Mark and I had spent half the night with him in A&E; back then, we even had to ask directions to the hospital.
I shifted the box to a different position; I’d lost the knack of carrying. As I walked over the canal bridge I wondered about chucking the thing in, letting Mark’s old hopes and dreams float away or sink into the depths. I rested the chest on the parapet, staring down into the water. Of course, below was a lock: no use for disposing of anything.
I heaved the box back into my aching arms and set off again. As I stepped off the bridge, a dark figure loomed up. It looked like Mark’s old drummer, it hunched like him with a hat pulled low.
“Need anything, mate? Good skunk?”
I shook my head and walked past, keen just to get to the Tube. All around me memories stepped from behind walls. A snatch of acoustic guitar floated from a pub window, an old Ry Cooder song that Mark used to sing; people I thought I recognised from drunken nights and wasted mornings; someone cupping their hands to light a fag just the way Mark did.
The orange light of a taxi came towards me, and I hitched the wooden box awkwardly on one knee to free an arm and flag it down. I wrenched the door open, lurching into the open space and collapsing onto the seat.
“Get me out of here.”
Get me out before I drown, before I go down under all the leftovers of my past. Just get me away.
The driver looked concerned, so I straightened up, focussed and told him my address. He nodded and set off, leaving me once again staring at my reflection in a window. I’m still here. Still breathing. Just.
Safely back in my own flat, I parked the wooden box on the floor, sat beside it, and even flipped one of the catches. No. Not now, not tonight.
I poured myself a whisky, larger than usual, and slid Shelly out of her case. The wood was silky-cold against my hands as I settled the guitar against myself and fumbled through a few chords. My fingers were stiff and awkward; I had never been Mark’s most apt pupil.
Slowly, quietly, I began to sing.