The Girl on The Stair

This is a piece I wrote several years ago and only just rediscovered, thanks to my Dad, who e-mailed me a file of all my old writing from the computer at home. It's very short, and at the time of writing I think it was meant to be the introduction to a longer piece, however it never got completed, and strangely I like some things more in their uncompleted state. I haven't got any pictures to go with this post, but if someone lovely would like to do illustations or photographs then that would make me very happy.

He dropped his tattered art portfolio all down the stairs in the  library because he was looking at her. She felt that she would like to walk on and ignore him, but being the only person on the stairs she could not do this. As they bent to pick up the rough paper sketches and mosaics of crumpled ribbon portraying the sea he noticed that her hair was catching the light like a pearl on a sea-lapped shore. 

She noticed he had sand in his fingernails and grains of it trickled out on the papers he struggled to retrieve from the floor. 

He noticed she was slim and wearing a tight fitting red coat. 

She noticed that his grey string croquet jumper smelt of the sea. 

He noticed that her fingernails were like tiny pink shells with cuticles pushed back and wondered how long this miracle had taken to achieve. 

She noticed he had ‘Ring Dad’ scrawled on his hand, the ink soaking and fading into individual particles of skin,and suddenly she couldn’t not like him. 

    

Later he remembered the pleasant,  smooth coolness of the linoleum against his fingers on the stairs and this memory was forever entangled with the first time he properly saw her face. 

She remembered that a wooden framed window above them had been open and little drops of rain flew in and made her worry it would frizz her hair. 

He remembered the hugeness of her sand brown eyes and the way her blonde hair cascaded triumphantly out of its pale blue band.

She may have noticed the grainy, youthful roughness of his skin, but to be honest she can’t really remember. She was, after all, in a hurry to get to a violin lesson, and at that poin  in her life their meeting seemed of minor importance. 

He couldn’t stop thinking about her for days, referring to her in  his mind and his dreams as the girl on the stairs. 

She never mentioned him, and thought very little of it. 

When he passed her in the street, outside the subway, where her hair seemed to light up the grey cobbles, it was a major occurrence, and he burst in on me beaming and announced he had just seen the girl on the stairs and she had smiled at him. 

When she passed him on the street she wondered where she knew this person from and returned his smile out of politeness, because she was sure she must know him from somewhere. She  didn’t mention these incidents to me, and although I knew him, and I knew her, I never connected his description of the vibrant alive Girl On The Stairs with Eleanor, nor did I think she would have any reason to know Leo. 

I introduced them at a concert. She was brushing imagined dust off her violin while idly chatting to me. He was on the other side of the room staring at the grand candelabra and making it multiply into numerous candelabra by glazing his eyes in different ways. She was asking if her hair was OK to go onstage. 

He thought the room was wonderful and marbly and was entranced by it, as it reminded him of something he’d seen in a dream. 

She thought  the room was too large and the space made her shiver, although the evening was warm. Then I did the stupidest thing in my life. I said,  “You’ll have to meet my friend Leo before you go onto stage.”. She thought this would be a good distraction to kill the few minutes before she had to return to the orchestra. 

He didn’t see us coming across the room and jumped when I tapped his shoulder. She laughed and he almost jumped again. She vaguely recognised him and smiled and he smiled wider. So I introduced them. 

“It’s OK, I think we met once didn’t we?” he said.  

“Yes, I have a vague recollection,” she said with a smile. “Now where

was it?” 

He pursed his lips as though in thought. “You know, I really can’t remember,” he said. 

And then I realised she must be the girl on the stair, there’s no way he would ever forget meeting someone, unless he wanted them to think they didn’t matter. 

She badly wanted to remember where she knew him from. 

He wanted to let her hair loose and spread it out on a white pillow and kiss every strand one by one.  

She wanted to know what he was studying, and which year he was in. 

    

He wanted to know what she dreamed about. 

She wanted to know if he liked classical music and was he looking forward to the concert? 

He wanted to know whether the music would say something about her soul, her thoughts, her feelings. 

She wanted to know whether he liked Mozart, Schubert, Mahler, Brahms, Trad Jazz? 

He wanted to know how she liked to be kissed. 

She asked more questions than he did, and returned to the stage thinking he must be shy.