The Tishers

"My imagination is the one thing that I really like about myself. It is the longest one night stand I've ever had, and it has never let me down. Yet."

Here's an odd little tale inspired by something that happened to me yesterday. I wrote part of it then and the rest just now. I was gearing up to write something quite lengthy when I suddenly realised it was finished, that there was nothing more to say and a lot that I wanted to leave as I found it. The Tishers is that sort of story, I think, the sort that's best left in first-draft form, with issues unresolved and meanings unexplained.

I'm going to be away from tomorrow until Wednesday, so this will probably be the last update until then.

“It’s the tarmac. Can’t they do anything about the tarmac? It’s all sticky. I could barely walk out there.”

These were the first words I ever heard Nia say, though I was a good ten feet away and she didn’t say them particularly loudly. Silence was her agent in that respect. When she entered stage left, shoving the automatic door open faster than it was prepared to go, beginning her strange little speech over its screech of protest, everybody paid attention.

“The car park is melting,” she said. “How can you just leave it that way?”

I was standing in the horror section, and I’d simply stopped in the act of removing a book from the shelf to stare at this intrusion. I wasn’t alone. There were five or six others in the room with me, including the librarian, and we’d all frozen the moment she’d walked in, like robots. I didn’t really see her in the first few seconds of that surreal freeze-frame. I was reacting to the unexpected, to the sudden realisation that the rules governing this particular institution had been breached. Not such a heinous crime, pushing open a door and talking loudly to nobody in particular, but not the kind of thing you’re ordinarily prepared to confront on a summer afternoon in your local library.

“It’s not right,” she said, and disappeared behind a shelf to my left, walking purposefully into the children’s section.

She had platinum blonde hair. She was wearing an electric blue summer dress and matching shoes. The colours were almost offensively bright, stark against the drab library browns and greens. Those were the obvious details, and they were all I had time to register before she was out of sight.

With the girl gone, the scene she’d paused seemed to take on an even more surreal air. My eyes found the librarian’s. He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips and – like an orchestra at the conductor’s signal – we resumed our browsing.

I’d only gone to the library out of boredom, really. I’d been hoping for some interesting new selections, but by the time I made my way to the counter, I had only a couple of sci-fi novels I’d read before. While the librarian stamped and swiped, I turned and looked into the children’s section, where the girl with the platinum hair was sitting in a plastic chair coloured a garish yellow, her face more or less hidden behind a large book with a footballer on the cover.

“It takes all kinds,” the librarian said, and slid the books back to me.

I let a smile ghost across my lips. I had nothing to say.

I walked slowly across the car park, staring down at the cracked tarmac beneath my feet. It was hot, and I remembered tabloid headlines of summers past; the M25 turning to a boiling, shallow swamp in the sun’s unrelenting glare. Not today, though. We hadn’t even neared those peaks, and now dusk was drawing the heat from the air. The car park was uneven and broken, shoots of green showing nature’s determination here and there, but that was all.

I was lost in my thoughts, and when the hand came down on my shoulder, I almost cried out. I turned, ready to let my anger show, and there she was, much younger than I’d expected, looking surprised at my reaction, eyes wide and curious and the exact same shade as that dress. She held her hand up just a few inches from my face.

“I can’t write,” she said. “The Tishers land on my shoulder and my hand shakes.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right at first. She had an odd way of speaking. The cadence and rhythm of her syllables spoke of an unfamiliarity with the language, yet I could detect no trace of an accent.

“Tissues?” I said.

“Tishers. That’s what I call them. I’m Nia.”

“I’m confused.”

“It suits you. Do you want to see them?”

“You’re not making any sense,” I said.

She looked almost heartbroken at this, and in that moment of sadness I was struck by how pretty she was, how unique and fragile. I dragged my gaze from hers and found myself staring at the tarmac again.

“Can’t you see it?” she asked, and lifted one light blue foot as though it was an effort to do so.

I lifted my own foot in response, demonstrating the ease with which it could be done.

“I don’t know how you do it,” she said.

“It’s not…” I began. But I could see she believed it was. “What’s a Tisher?”

She seemed pleased that I’d asked, and when she turned and walked away, it was with a clear indication that I should fall into step beside her. We moved across the car park and out onto the main road in comfortable silence. I watched her watching the sky, her eyes seeming to scan the darkening void above as though searching for a sign.

“I’m Keiji,” I said. “Nia is an unusual name.”

“Not so unusual,” she replied.

We passed a church, and she slowed to watch a pair of painters packing the tools of their trade into the back of a van. They’d been renewing the colours of the huge double doors, and the job was unfinished, faded pink showing beneath a deep red almost the colour of blood. I thought of the plants growing beneath the parked cars. I thought of sex. Nia laced her fingers through mine as though reading my mind.

“Obscene,” she said, and smiled.

I looked up at the image of Christ on the cross that hung above the doors, an effigy stripped of his clothes and dreadfully thin, head lolling forward, brow creased with bravery in the face of pain. I swallowed.

“Yes,” I said.

She lead me onward, past the gaudy displays of the town centre and out to its extremities, to a place where tower blocks flanked us like chaperones and every available surface was covered with grafitti that read like a thousand fragmented lines from the same desperate poem. Her warm hand guided me inside, up flights of hard, narrow steps, through the smell of urine and cheap hygiene products. She opened the door to a flat and we went inside.

“See, Keiji?” she said.

There were no carpets, no furniture, no wallpaper. Just words. Sentences, poems, paragraphs, essays, stories. They ran into and over each other, elegant streams of prose covering the faded remains of obscenities, meaningless statements that became great and meticulous theories. There were jokes, tales of loss, words strung together with no purpose at all except to fill the space.

“Nia…” I whispered.

She pulled me to the window, and when I looked out I understood the size of her work. In paint, in felt-tip, in biro, in pencil, in crayon. Carved and scrawled and carefully written. In every imaginable colour and size. This was her canvas, her parchment, her blank page.

“Do you see now?”

My eyes fell to the tiny cars parked so far below us, to the bubbling, shifting surface they rested on. Somewhere behind me I heard the skittering of tiny claws, the fluttering of tiny wings. Something small and angry gave a little screech of frustration that sent a shiver up my spine.

“They make your hand shake,” I said.

“Yes,” Nia said, and her stare was that of the obsessive, of the tortured. “And I have so much work to do.”