Abigail Parry
[ Biography ]
Tunnel of Love
Madeleine had had bad luck with dating agencies. Every Saturday night it was the same: riding the rocking bulk of the tube back home alone, shifting uncomfortably in brand-new underwear; then the shuttered chrome flank popping her out like a pea at Tufnell Park, to click her lonely way home. She’d traversed every line from top to bottom, climbing the kinked blue ladder up to Arnos Grove, sliding down the rigid black snake to Tooting Bec. She’d gone round and round the Circle line so many times it made her dizzy just thinking about it, followed the splayed green fingers of the District out beyond the river, and shuttled back and forth along the terse red equator. But she was always disappointed, and each Saturday night ended just the same.
Then one night it happened. She was sitting in her usual seat, staring up at the delicate coloured web, murmuring off the ordered, alchemical names under her breath like an incantation, when it hit her. Suddenly, finally, she saw it for what it really was.
She went straight home, heels clicking with fresh purpose. She found two biros and began to trace out all her blood vessels, blue for the arteries, red for the veins. It took her a week to finish: an elaborate tangled root system, not a capillary out of place. It looked like writhing spaghetti, like the delicate fronds of meaty ferns. It looked like the contents of the Sargasso Sea. The following Saturday night, with infinite care and deliberation, she laid her map over one of the London Underground.
Now she spends her Saturday nights in sturdy, practical underwear, in galoshes and a head torch, roaming the tunnels. Her map had indicated quite plainly that her heart lay on the Jubilee, somewhere just south of Finchley Road.
Chrysalis
He knew his father couldn’t have gone far, not really. Even though they showed him that damn box, so horribly economical in its dimensions, expanding sullenly into a rough diamond as though it resented having to accommodate shoulders. The box had a voice of a London cab driver. It said, alright mate, I’ll take you, but you’re gonna have to fold your arms.
That day, the house was filled with a stark throng of bent carrion birds, with tarnished silver and blue cigarette smoke, with cracked voices and heavy, opaque silences. That new word, wreath, went round and round in his head, because it sounded like breathe: like sad rueful breath moving through the house in dry buffets, smelling of dead roses, rustling like crepe and taffeta and dusty pinions. He went up the stairs in his buckled shoes, fat and black and shiny as beetles, and up, out, into the upper reaches of the house, where the air was thinner, where the butterfly cases were kept.
The chrysalis slumbered in the corner. When he pressed his ear up against its warm bulk, he could hear dull stirrings within: it sounded like someone trying to open out a very stiff leather umbrella. He’d have to wait though. These things, he knew, took time.
New Arrival
It’s A Boy! cheered the first row of cards. And under this banner were plump, hairless things swaddled in pastel blues, in the dreamy gauze of soft-focus. Their eyelids were thin as splashes of milk, and he wondered briefly at the formless, primordial scenes that would be unfurling like snowdrops underneath.
Their sisters were folded neatly into a trim column next door. Here was a whole sunset of different shades of pink: rose-petal, candy-floss, fuchsia, ice-cream, cherryade – he’d never imagined there could be so many. And in each nestled another little dozing bundle, its own shade of pink entirely.
None of these would do. In the end, he opted for the non-committal A New Arrival; he bought a black biro too. He’d have to add the extras himself: the hair, the teeth, the scales. It would be hard, he thought, to get the eyes right.