They had nothing to say to each other. David can hear himself breathing and the phone has a background static buzz but at the other end Ursula must be holding her breath. He knows that she knows who it is on the phone. He waits.
David has just arrived home from his office at the law firm. In the bedroom, wardrobe doors hang open also waiting. In the bathroom, the little yellow rubber duck is missing but, Oh God, her pink toothbrush is still next to his black one. Waiting. Photos have disappeared and the book shelves are half empty.
Now, he’s on his mobile, creeping around the lounge room, making sure he stays on the carpet. If he dares to speak, it will be in whispers. Back at the bathroom door he gets a glimpse of his face. Yuck. Red eyes and puffy dark circles remind him that he has had no sleep. After the 3 am phone call, then the 3 hour screaming match, he had to leave for the office.
“click”. Now he can’t even hear her not breathing.
“bleeeeeep bleeeeeeep” Now it’s engaged. He has no choice but to wait.
How come they have nothing to say to each other? After five years of being together surely there must be something one of them can say. But who starts? What imbecile thing can he say? What is he expecting her to say? He waits.
“Please Ursula, please call me” he yells at no-one.
The phone call was not planned. It jangled through the apartment echoing off the bare white walls and sleek timber floors. But it was not the first time he had been on the phone in the middle of the night, after all his company’s head office was in the US. Ursula had just seen red and she’d gone completely bezerk at the interruption to her sleep. Adding fuel to the fire, he had stayed on the phone for about 15 minutes. They were both wide awake and the slanging match was on for young and old. Who knows what the crux of the argument was, as is often the way major arguments don’t need to be based on anything serious. And now she’d left him just waiting and in agony.
The lap top “bleeps”. David trips over himself as he hurries to the PC. It’s from Ursula
“I can’t talk, I can barely type. But I can’t stand the vision of you pacing the floor and waiting or should I say hoping, that all of this will blow over. David it’s over. I need a life. I need a partner where I am involved, can contribute and where we can be as one. I am tired of being just a part of you. I want to be me. I want to find me. Usually I am the one waiting. Just waiting until it suits you to have me around. Now you know what waiting is like. Bloody painful isn’t it?”
4 comments:
Heather says:
A searing little relationship snapshot. There is so much we don't know, so many questions we have, and yet the mood is complete. There's nothing to say because they're finally confronting how out of synch they truly are. - At this moment in time, anyway.
The back-story paragraph beginning with "The phone call was not planned" could use a flag or two to let us know immediately that it's back-story, something like, "The phone call that had started the whole thing off..." I had to reread a time or two to get the temporal flow of events.
I really liked how you threaded the theme, "waiting", throughout the story.
From Gordon
Sue, it is a rollicking little story. It has overtones of what I have written but I did not read it before I wrote my story.
Needs a bit of editing as I become confused and not sure what is dialogue and what is not and when there should be commas, etc.
Like Heather said, the waiting theme was a really neat idea.
I would have liked a little more of the internal dialogue of David and possibly both of them to give the story some more depth of emotion.
Kerry says:
This story tells of such a desperate situation, Sue. The finale of a relationship, so much misunderstanding and lack of communication and being out of step. You have painted a vivid picture of David and Ursula's plight.
Your description of the wardrobe doors waiting was very evocative and the discovery that the pink toothbrush was still there gave the reader some hope for a reunion.
There were a couple of times when the storyline wasn't consistent. For example, there was mention of a 3 hour screaming match at the start but later it appeared to be 15 minutes. Details, but they can be important for the validity of your story.
I find the use of 'click' and 'bleep' a bit distracting. Maybe you could use something like 'The phone clicks.' instead.
Thanks for a terrific story.
I like how you developed the mood in this story. There is an edginess to it for me that would come out of a deteriorating relationship that has become too filled with major arguments, arguments based on nothing serious yet somehow become the next world war.
We never discover what the argument was about, David certainly doesn't know, yet it was a straw the broke the camels back. Ursula gives us the clues as to what it's about for her, yet David is oblivious to what happened.
I liked this piece Sue and think that you stretched out here.
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