The World’s Wife — Cynthia Lennon
I wrote a 500-word fictional monologue in the voice of Cynthia Lennon for Mslexia’s ‘The World’s Wife’ magazine segment. The piece has been published in the 91st issue, available to buy online and from certain retailers across the UK.
I look out the window onto Cromwell Road. It’s starting to snow; thick lumpy flakes splatter the grey of the pavement. They’re still out there in tatty sleeping bags with their eyeliner and beehives and love letters for you. I count thirty, forty, forty-five. Various artifacts are locked in their near-frozen fingers. Flowers, letters, locks of hair. Sometimes I sift through the debris. They leave it on the doorstep when they get tired. If they get tired.
I don’t usually talk to them.
But this one’s got these big green eyes and a fringe cut short with kitchen scissors and she looks just like this kid we used to know. When she opens her mouth I half-expect this thick scouse accent to come out but of course it doesn’t. It’s southern and chipper and sweet like the rest of them.
I don’t know how she got inside. She’s sitting at the top of the stairway in a pea-green coat, knees pulled up to her chest. ‘I like your shoes,’ she says. I had the ludicrous idea I might take the bins out. I look at her feet, she’s wearing moccasins. ‘I used to have a pair like that,’ I tell her.
She works in a shoe shop on Old Brompton Road, she says.
‘Do you come here often?’ I ask, as if we’re discussing some bar in the city, not the floor outside our front door.
She shrugs. ‘As much as I can.’
I would have quite liked to work in a shoe shop, I think when I’m back inside. I don’t think I resent you for that, but maybe I do. I imagine talking to all those people every day, saying things like, how’s that for size?
Julian wakes up and I feed him and I look out the window some more. I’m wondering what you’re doing now. I’m staring at your name, painted on a sign in the shivering clutches of a girl on the street. She looks no more than sixteen and I’m thinking about that first night in the Casbah when I stood under the stars you’d painted on the ceiling, when you were nothing but a boy with a guitar and some mates you could play with.
Now you’re like a dog with a bell. But the bell is the collective shriek of teenage Londoners because the cold and fatigue were all worth it. It’s almost one when you wrestle your way in tonight, an envelope of cold around you. Julian’s awake and he’s crying.
‘I’ll talk to Brian,’ you say as you slump into a chair. We’ve still got years to go. Lucy isn’t in the sky yet and there are no diamonds in sight. You don’t love drugs more than you love your family. And you don’t love her more than you love me.
Yet.
I’m thinking about the days when you would come through that door and kiss me. You’re staring at the floorboards in front of you.
‘We need to move.’
