The Appointment

"Our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To thee do we cry, us banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning, and weeping from this veil of tears. O most gracious advocate..."

Salve Regina

Content Warning:

Strong sex/sex work References

Transcript

The Appointment

Zealous but somehow detached, Daisy-May readied Brian Nixon for his appointment. She washed him with soap and water, shaved him as well as she was able with a manual razor, combed his hair, and got him into a set of clean, comfortable clothes. She was able to do most of this without the aid of the electric harness, employing it only infrequently so as to elevate Mr. Nixon at certain crucial moments. 

            In the time she had before the “special lady” arrived for the appointment with Mr. Nixon, by which time she needed to be out of the house, Daisy-May went to her room to pray her rosary. She had emerged from the rehabilitation clinic newly religious. The Catholic faith wasn’t new to her, but her adherence to its tenets, her faith in its dogmas, her fervour for even its most anodyne practices, were all barely two months old. It was Wednesday and so, as instructed, she prayed the glorious mysteries. It was a bleak, inglorious day. But it didn’t matter what sort of a day she found it, it was Wednesday, and Wednesday was the day of the rosary’s glorious mysteries: the resurrection, ascension, Pentecost, the assumption and the coronation of Mary, queen of heaven. By the time the “special lady” arrived, (Mr. Nixon wouldn’t even tell Daisy-May her name), Daisy-May had already been gone for some time and was well on her way into town. 

She walked up the long street, along an embankment separated from the traffic by a hedge. She found the trees shading the street very beautiful. It was then that memory randomly reminded Daisy-May that the “special lady” was brown-skinned. Mr. Nixon wouldn’t tell Daisy-May the woman’s name, but he had told her that he liked- “preferred” perhaps- black and brown women. He favoured them; he did not look like them. The shade of his own skin was deathly pale.      

            Just under a hundred yards away, an eastward-travelling tram trundled across the tram-crossing, and Daisy-May knew it would be some thirteen minutes until the next one. 

            It was strange. Watching the tram disappear, she keenly felt the reality that she was not inside it. The traffic moved on, crossing the patch of road with its little, sunken pair of intersecting rails. Daisy-May had, similarly, an acute sense of being absent from Mr. Nixon’s house, a sense of being able to feel her absence from within it. While whatever it was that went on went on, it was almost as though a disembodied part of Daisy-May were there, witnessing the goings-on, the advent of that sad, consequential, financed congress between Mr. Nixon and the “special lady”, sometimes the “lovely lady”- if he was in a good mood when the subject came up. Speaking as a single, partial, credulous constituency, this witnessing part of Daisy-May was urging the rest of her to flee, to walk away from the house and keep on walking, to consider no return for several hours. A little way beyond the tram-crossing, an old man was approaching a post-box. Daisy-May watched as he was led with impossible slowness by an outstretched hand, which trembled as it clutched a letter.

            She waited patiently for the tram at the bleak, little tram-stop. She purchased a return ticket from the machine and sat down in the seat under the shelter. There was a breeze in the world. Across from her, she watched a plastic bag jump down from the tiny platform onto the rails and leap back up again. With a distant wheeze, then a diminutive rumble, and at last a mounting clickety-clack, the next eastbound tram rolled into the stop. A few people slouched facelessly off, Daisy-May got on, the doors slid shut, the driver rang the bell, and the tram began crawling, over the tram-crossing and then beyond, into town.

            After a while on flat track, the tram began climbing. It rose steeply towards the overcast sky, and then levelled, cruising roof height to a line of pretty terraced houses, painted sky-blue and cream and deep-red. Then the tramway plunged down and the tram rolled with the plummet into the street where the rails were laid in the surface of the road, almost as if the tram had crossed some impossible boundary and had suddenly become a strange, long bus, sailing quite nonchalantly over the street.

            With a long whine of its wheels in their grooves, the tram quite sharply swerved and slewed, beneath a large, ugly bridge, towards the Wandle Park stop. In the darkness of the broad bridge, the parallel tram-tracks gleamed from the black concrete with the unsettling glints of grins or knives. At Wandle Park, a young woman of Indian appearance got onto the tram. The sound of her footsteps on the car-floor drew Daisy-May’s attention to the shoes she had on: bright, yellow low-block heels. She sat down in the seat right opposite Daisy-May, and the clop-clop of her heels ceased. She was carrying a number of bags, set them down with relief. The doors closed. The nasal announcement blurted the final destination and next stop, and the tram lurched into life once again. Daisy-May and the woman shared fleeting eye-contact a few times. Their eyes, wandering over the faces arrayed about them in the tram, would meet and then move on elsewhere.        

            Only now did Daisy-May remember herself. For the majority of the ride, she had sat in that tram in a side-on, centre seat, her fixation on every detail of the journey and the vessel quite absurd and all-consuming. Desperately she clung to the many-featured world, hanging upon tiny minutiae. Now, she remembered herself and she delved inward. She knew there were roughly three stops before Griffon Street, the stop right in the centre of town. But the passage of the world in the car windows as the tram zipped from juncture to juncture now paled to vague insignificance. Daisy-May realised that she hated killing time in this way, she detested having this time alone with herself thrust so compulsorily upon her. She began to feel impotently cocooned in the tram’s boastful whirrs of sudden speed and more sudden deceleration as it approached its stops. How she dreaded her exit at Griffon Street. What would she do with these two hours? Less than two hours now, now that one eighth of their totality had been worn away. Still, this one hour and these forty-five minutes were giant, enormous. She knew she had to be out of the house, even received some reduced remuneration for complying with Mr. Nixon’s demands in this way. Still, something about this state of affairs made her want to cry out bitterly at the passing world

She pondered the hollow pathos of what was occurring inside Mr. Nixon’s house, what went on, and went on most months, sometimes twice, sometimes three times in a single month. The previous live-in carer had explained this ritual to Daisy-May. Naturally, there was no invitation for Daisy-May to take a position on the matter. It was a ritual; and responsibility for it had been bequeathed to Daisy-May, never mind what she thought of it. Her predecessor had told her that Mr. Nixon had been seeing an out-call escort at least once a month for the last seven years. She envisaged the specifics as closely as she was able. She imagined the escort, brown-skinned as Mr. Nixon preferred, gyrating on his lap, strip-teasing, shedding her undergarments, taking his member in her brown hand, guiding his trembling white hands towards her breasts. She knew that Mr. Nixon paid the escort extra to do for him what he couldn’t do himself. She would cleanse him when it was over, she would change his clothes if necessary. If it was yielded, she would mop up his ejaculate so Daisy-May wouldn’t have to. Knowing some could do for him what others couldn’t, he carefully managed what lights he was seen in, and by whom. He entrusted his life to others, divided up the tasks appropriately. 

But for all its discriminate dignity, it was a state of affairs that hurt to think about. Daisy-May preferred not to think about it, any of it. She believed it, it was clearly very real: despite his atrophy, his immobility, his confinement to his wheel-chair, his invalid’s dependence; the desire for touch, for more than touch, burned on eternally. And yet, under these strains, under these circumstances, she couldn’t believe it was better to have it than to do without it. She couldn’t believe it was a worthwhile price. The admission of defeat that it was, an admission of powerlessness sorer and more mortifying than prayer.

Daisy-May’s eyes refocused upon the face of the woman opposite, the Indian shade and the soft, unchiselled features, the deep, distracted eyes. It was the stop before Griffon Street, she always forgot its name. Greenway. There was nothing green in sight, no wonder she couldn’t remember it. She remembered something for no reason, no apparent reason at any rate. Her mother had been landlady of a village pub, The Railway. Right next to the station, it was a kind of waiting room, an unofficial station bar, as well as a cosy place to stay, and a rowdy local when the football was on. One day, her mother had the idea of serving free toasties on a Friday. It fell to Daisy-May to distribute them, to go around the pub with the tray and offer them to each patron, or table- whichever made more sense. How old would she have been; how old must she have been? She couldn’t have been older than seventeen, couldn’t have been younger than fourteen. Fifteen- why not. Cheese and ham, cheese and mushroom; cheese and ham, cheese and mushroom; thirty years away her lips moved, automatically uttering their refrain.  

Greenway. The Indian woman, who had been typing on her phone, looked up from the screen, seeming concerned, and stood up quickly. The doors opened and threatened to close again with an apparent impatience. The woman hurried off the tram, leaving behind one of her bags. Just one. A little paper bag. The woman closest had two badly behaved children. She didn’t notice the paper bag. Nor did anyone else. Only Daisy-May noticed it. She sat in the woman’s seat and, in an instant, the little paper bag was hers. 

By the time the woman noticed that one of her bags was missing, the tram was already well on its way to the next stop. She sighed and cursed but she lacked the energy, perhaps the heart, to try and outrun it. It wouldn’t be hard to beat the tram to its next stop. Along this section of the tramway, threading its way through the street-traffic, the stops were very close together. The tram’s boastful progress slowed to a tentative trundle.

Daisy-May looked inside the paper bag. Inside, there were two inanimate, stuffed, smiling beings, both of them toys, toys for a girl Daisy-May thought. There was a bright, pretty rag doll, red-haired, rose-cheeked, and wearing a maroon dress. There was also a rabbit. A bipedal, squatting, very fluffy rabbit. It had marmalade fur, big, pink ears, and glossy, pitch-black eyes. It had on a cherry-chequered bowtie. The road rumbled beneath the tram, and the world went by in the windows. Daisy-May hadn’t long to look at the two toys. She wasn’t very sure what to do. At just a few knots faster than walking pace, the tram sailed past the many pedestrians on the streets going the same way as it and eased cleanly into the next stop, Griffon Street. On impulse, she took the two toys from the paper bag and put them in her coat pockets, both of which had quite a bit of room inside. She left the tram, scrunching up the paper bag as she disembarked and putting it in a nearby bin, right next to the tram stop. 

The tram departed, clanging its bell as its went off. Daisy-May felt the soft toys bulge in her pockets. She wondered why they had been purchased, who they were for. She was ashamed to admit that she was elated. She was elated by this larceny, this deception, this minor, kleptomaniacal crime she had decided to perpetrate against a brown-skinned woman on a tram.

The woman had not seemed like a married woman to Daisy-May, nor a woman with children. In both those senses, Daisy-May and this woman were alike. Who were the toys for, if not her own child? Somebody else’s child? Herself? Daisy-May adjusted to the idea that she might never know. In any case, they were hers now.         

There was much that she wanted to do. It could be a delightful afternoon if she wished. She stood, amazed at this new ease with which positivity came to her, with which she cast off all previous doubt and grimness. Having made this peculiar conquest, she’d go the bookshop, coffee shop, the pastry-shop, the patisserie, the charity shop, the antique shop. Then, when it was over, she’d take the tram back to Mr. Nixon’s house, just the way she had come, give him dinner, get him off to bed early, and enjoy the quiet.