Miriam

by Jay Merill


Miriam is fond of stylised hellos and goodbyes, her lips drawn apart curvaceously, cherry-red.  In between the greeting and the parting there’s a spill of words that say very little.  A least said soonest mended interlude. She’s sitting on a bench by the canal in Maida Vale, her bags all around her, archipelago style.  Quite nice plaid suitcases once, but frayed about the edges now. And a matching wheelie-thing.  She likes to have them placed just so with herself at centre. Miriam has a plaid scarf too, done up over her head and folded round her chin like a muffler.  Guarded eyes peek out.


Sitting still and bolt upright, she’s looking at this moment like the loneliest person on the planet.  And her eyes are watching out for something.  A door at a house opposite opens and a woman and two girls appear. The school-run.  Miriam stays put, their car goes past, no one looks at her.  After a bit she makes her way back along the canal towpath, waddling slowly on account of all the luggage.  Later, on the Edgware Road, she’ll do her big hello to passing strangers.  Most hurry by, embarrassed in case she’s a loony, though several do stop and pass the time of day. The odd few want to talk but find it hard to catch exactly what she’s saying.  She has this way of slipping and sliding from one topic to another without a break. And in what seems like the middle of a question she’ll stop and cough.  Or sigh.  Then she’ll start up again, carrying  on as before.  She’s like an unskilled reader who pauses in all the wrong places in a text and runs the separate words together till they’re incomprehensible.  They see her as mad though harmless.


She used to live in Maida Vale in the very house across from the canal where the door was opened and the girls came out.  Miriam comes here to watch them. She’s living in the past.  It’s not yesterday or the day before that, or even last year that occupies her thoughts.  Her mind is held by images of times way back.  Six, seven years ago.  When she was a married woman with small twin daughters.  She organised their activities, and the school-run, lived in a grey house down a samey grey street.  Or at least that’s the way Miriam secretly saw things.  Her own life felt grey and samey too; Ned, her husband seeming like a stranger.  She felt he had another woman but kept her suspicions under wraps; becoming increasingly distant. Meanwhile she perfected her openings and closures. Did the big juicy cherry-ripe smile when greeting husband and acquaintances alike, after which she kept up bland and empty small talk, her well-practiced coughing and sighing  and licking of  lips brought in as backup.  Till it was time to part.  Then she rounded things off with radiant goodbyes, her smile equally intense.   


Days passed.  On the surface Miriam was absorbed with the girls’ complaints if there was no bread today for the ducks on the canal, or with Jane’s distress when she cut her finger on the sharp point of one of the railings, or when Mel dropped her pocket-money and feared the coins had rolled into a crack in the pavement.  But her life didn’t seem real to her, and she felt she couldn’t go on this way forever.  One morning in May five years ago Miriam did her biggest and brightest goodbye.  She left her twin girls then aged six and their father.  Simply opened the front door and bowed out of their lives.  She disappeared. 


Very often now Miriam comes back to the street and watches her family, still living in the same house. And there’s a woman.  Miriam has seen her and Ned holding hands. The woman is the substitute for herself.  Miriam can’t help feeling ghostlike and thinking how strange everything  is.  When she’d been living that other life she was hardly there at all, but now she no longer has it she’s scarcely anywhere else.  Then, her presence was assumed, now she goes unnoticed. She’s just one of the homeless that people have got so used to seeing.