Petrol

When he discovered that she was drinking petrol he wasn’t surprised. He had spotted the bottle in her bag. She would take it out, sipping at intervals throughout the day. He knew by the worn label that the bottle had been used more than once, and he could tell it didn’t contain alcohol. When he asked her why she simply shrugged, as if it were not something to make an issue of. But there had to be a reason, so he pressed her further. She could only reply:
‘I don’t know. It makes me feel comforted.’
‘And you don’t have any ill effects?’
No, not really, Nothing.’
‘How long…’
‘Only the last three years. I took tiny sips at first, then a little more. I’ve got it about right at the moment, I think. A bottle lasts me a few days.’

She didn’t smoke, so there was no risk there, but he began to feel nervous when she was cooking or sitting near the fire, although she seemed oblivious to the danger.
Why he wasn’t surprised, he couldn’t say. It just seemed natural, somehow, and he told her so.
‘It reminds me of something,’ she said one day, ‘something I’ve forgotten. It’s a kind of memory…’
‘What? I mean, what do you remember?’
Well, it’s not a memory of a place, or a time or situation. It’s the memory of an emotion, and I can’t get to it any other way. It reminds me of a feeling I used to have.’
‘What kind of feeling?’ She paused to take a sip.
‘It’s not really a particular emotion, more the sense of a time earlier in my life, as if I remember the whole atmosphere as it was for me at some point in the past. But although I know the feeling so well, I can’t remember any events, or when it was.’ She took another tiny sip, looking up vacantly as if to invite inspiration.

‘I can remember it being spring, and seeing buds on the trees, and I can remember feeling like this. It’s not a specific emotion, but it’s how I felt that day, and on other days I can’t recall.’ He watched her, waiting for more information, but she became quiet. After a few minutes, she asked him to leave because she wanted to be on her own. He kissed her and left, her parting smile turned inward as he closed the door. She was no longer concerned with remembering; instead she began to follow a thread. The petrol connected her to something profound and yet so nebulous that she could barely hold on to it. Even when the feeling went, and she tried to think of the memory alone, it remained buried solidly in the background and her thoughts slipped off the impenetrable smoothness of its surface–she couldn’t get close to it and she needed the petrol. Then she could feel it, as herself, as her most private territory. She took another sip. She didn’t hold it in her mouth, just swallowed it down, like the first spirits of youth.

It was getting darker outside. Her stomach was warm with it all; full and complete until she was entirely suffused. There was a roundness about this experience, a completeness that was so inclusive it made other emotions colourless. She remembered times and places in her past when this completeness had enveloped her, realising with an awesome finality that this was her, that everything else, all the day-to-day, the routines, the changes, the life in which she had gradually become immersed; all of it became remote and peripheral, transitory. This was no longer a sense of something; she said it quietly–this is me–and she could feel herself becoming smooth, rounded and complete.

She took another sip, held it in her mouth and was amazed to find the taste repulsive. She tipped the rest over a bare patch of earth in the garden, and threw the bottle away. Sitting back in the chair, where it was still warm, she allowed her presence to fill the room, becoming heady with exhilaration as she felt herself expanding. Outside, traffic passed and the wind blew leaves from the trees. She just sat still, in one place, until he returned, coming in from the darkness outside and carrying a bottle of petrol.
‘I bought this for you,’ he said, standing in the shadow behind the door.
‘It’s okay, I don’t need it any more.’ He was surprised and a little hurt. The bottle felt stupid in his hand, but when he saw her smiling he relaxed.
‘You’re still smiling, then?’ he ventured, expecting an explanation.
‘I don’t want to drink any more petrol. I don’t need it now, but thanks anyway.’
After standing there with the bottle in his hand for a few minutes more, he went outside and poured the whole bottleful into the petrol tank of her car.
‘That’ll take us past the place we thought we were going,’ he said to himself, not understanding what he might have meant. But it sounded right. When he came back inside she held him, just because he was there, and it felt as if she were holding everything in the world, and he happened to be included simply because he was part of the world, just like her.
‘I’ve arrived,’ she thought to herself, ‘this is where I was heading and now I’ve arrived.’