She fixed her bespectacled eye upon the nearest sympathetic-looking individual - which happened to be Meech - and informed him that she was a painter ... but when the colours ran out, she had tried to evoke far-gone days when everything was black and white.
She took out from her expansive bag an example of her work, daubs of varying degrees of grey, depicting what seemed to be human faces peering from the bay windows of a line of terraced houses. She had caught marvellously the terror behind the eyes, essentially visions of despair ... despite their smiles. She smiled, too, beneath eyes that froze Meech's gaze within hers.
"My name is Meech, pleased to meet you," he said.
He pumped her arm as if they were both characters in a theatrical farce called Meech's Mirth.
"Sorry," she said, "I do rather rattle on when I talk about my paintings, and I agree it's best to be introduced when you're talking to someone."
"Well?" Meech smiled.
"Yes, I am Mrs Manning ... Ruth Manning."
"Now, Ruth, will you please explain this business of the colours running out? Was it because you became poor or something and couldn't afford them? Are greys, whites and blacks cheaper?"
She took out another painting, without answering, and this one was black all over ... like a starless, moonless night sky.
"That's Hell," she said simply, "and I've been there ... and back."
Meech had acted as a hospital visitor for some thirty years, but never had he met a patient quite like Ruth Manning. There were several volunteer visitors at the hospital that day, pensioners in the main, still with body and mind more or less intact, passing a lonely afternoon chatting with those who needed company more than themselves. Ruth had picked on Meech because, if he said so himself, he was a natural listener, always ready with the correct interpolations, urging the subject on to further expositions of their predicament and, by so doing, hopefully releasing the pent up emotions and ideas. But, as he always said, none so mad as those who only listened ... and Ruth had such a searing sanity it was only with some difficulty that he remembered he was visiting her and not vice versa.
The next picture she drew proudly from her bag really impressed Meech ... and it has haunted his dreams ever since. It depicted two human figures, one white and the other black, in what appeared at first to be a violent digging, spitting, wrestling, biting and clawing. But, then, he realised it was a passionate embrace - so intertwined, he found it difficult to tell which was male and which female, and even where one ended and the other began...
"I'm sure that's a photograph," he suddenly said on the spur of the moment.
She looked ashamed, almost tearful. He peered closer at the picture: the glistening muscles, the bare emotions in the eyes, the scrotum finely picked out, the body hair individually etched, the fleshy cavities sunken even beyond the picture's surface...
"Yes, you're right, Mr Meech, I took it in Hell ... with my Brownie box camera."
She had been to Hell, then, or to the only Hell in which Meech believed: the mind. Thus, indeed, too Hell, but not back again, because, surely, that particular Hell was the place she now inhabited, causing her to her lie to a kindly old aged pensioner like Meech: pretending that those snapshots were her paintings.
He was uncharacteristically angry. He got up and left her without even the usual politenesses. He turned at the door, however, to see that her face was white as a sheet, her eyes glazed with tears. The colour must have drained from his own face too, for the nurse at the door asked if he felt well. He nodded curtly and left through the hospital's swing doors into the rainswept night.
Ruth Manning turned up as indicated by the joining instructions in the Prospectus, but something seemed to be wrong, something small perhaps, for the place seemed just one inch away from true. As she tried to merge with the crowds in the hall, they were creating side-issues and not really addressing the true significance of the gathering. The conversations she overheard rattled like machine-guns: the sort which are never pointed at anything in particular:
"Beef is too expensive these days, so we make do with diced mutton, come Sundays..."
"I used to enjoy those old interludes on TV with the potter's wheel or cat pawing up at a ball of wool better than the actual programmes..."
"Do you remember Joan Davis in I MARRIED JOAN?"
"Some sports on TV were given the kiss of life when colour was invented."
"Forced feeding is how I survived my hunger strike and now they let me do it on my own."
"Grief is in the same segment of the emotional circle as joy ... and hate and love are in another ... and Hell and Heaven ... and I stand at the centre, watching."
The voices were around her, as if this were some outlandish convention, where themes were throwaway lines in an absurd theatre.
Someone, whom she knew, clapped her on the shoulder from behind. She turned quickly and realised it was not someone she knew, but she recognised the face from the front of the Prospectus that had arrived in colourful wrappers only the day before.
"Mrs Manning, I'm pleased to see you. The rostrum is all yours. We always look forward to talks from people, well, how shall we put it ... people in the know."
She was taken aback. She had come to listen to the speeches, not to give them. And then, aghast, she saw everybody around were hushed and hunching closer, faces staring, comparing mumbled notes between them, debating her appearance with pointed looks. Then the applause was deafening as the man from the Prospectus led her to the platform, amid the flashing of a thousand eyes.
"Don't fret, Mrs Manning ... we're all on your side. I'm sure it's going to be an enthralling talk. It's not every day a leading expert comes to our humble gathering."
Judging by the glossy Prospectus, not so humble, she thought, as she stumbled to the rostrum. Silence ensued almost at once. A hairpin dropped to the floor in her flurry had sounded like an aircraft crashing. She rummaged through her handbag for her glasses, but she could find nothing but waste paper. She coughed nervously as she raised her face, to see that the crowd had merged into one another, become part of the blur from which her brain was suffering.
"Well... I can only say how sorry I am ... I don't know what you were expecting, but whatever it is ... I'm afraid this must be a ludicrous case of mistaken identity."
By this time, her glasses, which must have been balanced on her hairstyle, slipped down with a clatter to her nose ... and she could see the audience much more clearly, all writing vigorously in their notebooks. Looking up from time to time, they nodded and smiled.
"I'm just a housewife who received a Prospectus advertising a talk on how women at home can fulfil themselves and become real human beings again."
There were men in the audience and they were perhaps scribbling more avidly in their notebooks than the women. She yearned for the rostrum to swallow her up. She had met a complete blockage, as panic hee-hawed and drained the blush from her face. Abruptly, she found herself standing beside the Prospectus Man, in the body of the audience, looking up at a bright angel waving its slow huge kite-wings on the rostrum, with words tripping so beautifully you could actually see the silky speech-bubbles they inhabited. He said that it was a really special person up there looking like a white-faced pierrot, etched against the backcloth, acting out some Morality Play, rather than a farce, in a stylisation more akin to dream than the monochrome reality it truly was.
She was both the actor and the acted upon. It was not a dream, though it was. She was performing on the rostrum, though she wasn't. The audience was there, in spirit if not in body. And the Prospectus Man led her toward the rostrum to allow some merging with the performer's shining parts. He was God, though he wasn't. She was dead, though she wasn't.
She looked down and saw a younger Mrs Manning in the audience, fresh from mindlessly ironing the shirts and from practising small talk with the people she one day hoped to meet. But she could only see mistily, for her glasses had been removed by one who wanted to kiss her forever in a black and white Heaven she had never dared believe could exist ... a Heaven that could not even be painted. Black and white - until she saw, behind silken wings, the rich blood of passion flowing between an angel and an undead.
When Meech returned to the hospital the following week, Ruth Manning was nowhere to be seen. He had desperately wanted to apologise for his behaviour since, truly, one couldn't be too hard on these people. They knew not what they did. He made enquiries with the nurse.
"Oh, Mrs Manning died suddenly..."
She scuttled off, for nurses were always busy. He did not have anything to do there that day, as all the inmates were caught up with watching sport on a black and white televison which another visitor had kindly donated to the ward.
He went home, hopelessly neighing out a strange laughter, a laughter in fact with which he wanted to cry ... and wondering what particular Heaven Ruth Manning's Hell had turned out to be. Somehow he felt guilty. Obviously too thin-skinned to take the emotional knocks of hospital visiting, he ought to think of his own old age, he thought. He could not wash his hands of the blood which began to stain them. Imagining it was a dream, he took his teeth out and went to bed early.
(published ‘Transversions’ 1998)
