Anna Metcalfe is a writer and lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. Her story collection Blind Water Pass was published in 2016. Chrysalis, publishing in May 2023, is her first novel. Metcalfe’s writing traffics in suggestion and allusion, and is concerned with ideas of reinvention, identity and obligation.
Listen to an audio extract from ‘Circles’
‘Circles’
I found the first one in a kitchen cupboard, a ring of dust where some bowls had been. The shelves were all half empty. I’d been giving away a lot of things. After that, I started seeing them in all kinds of places – circles of water, circles of shadow. I started making meanings from them. That’s what happens when you get something in your head and you live on your own. All your thoughts become true.
Across the city, businesses were closing. At the end of my street, an office cleared out and stood vacant for a while. Then it became a cafe, not a real one but a makeshift place, with trestle tables and milking stools. I spent a lot of time there, sitting by the window, looking at the trees in the park. I flicked the pages of magazines and watched people talking over drinks, running hands through their hair, scratching the corners of their mouths. I read the profiles of a hundred men on the app and wondered whether it might not be preferable to spend my life alone.
One afternoon, I swiped right on a man with a large face, a swatch of dirty brown hair, small eyes and grey stubble. He looked large in the photo, broad-shouldered and muscular, though it was always hard to tell. He worked in design. He had a daughter, thirteen years old. He liked canoeing and spaghetti. His guilty pleasure was enjoying a cigarette immediately after he’d been to the gym. He was clever, I thought, to mention the gym this way – without being obvious, without seeming to brag. In one of his photos, he was wearing a grey marl vest. There was a wobbly circle tattooed on his arm. I looked at the picture for some time. I kept coming back to the tattoo. It wasn’t long before he messaged me and we arranged to meet.
The first date went well. He was grumpy in a way that I enjoyed. It reassured me that he was easily displeased – he was discerning, I thought. I had been right about his body. He was tall with strong arms. I liked the heaviness he had around the middle, the way it pushed against the buttons of his shirt. He smelled good, too – a bit like cinnamon and a bit like sweat. When I arrived, he pulled me into an awkward hug – the way you might hug a cousin you hadn’t seen for a long time – then he kissed my face very close to my ear. It felt completely normal, as though our bodies had met before.
We got the basic stuff out of the way quickly – jobs, divorces, holidays, the recent, unseasonable warm spell. We didn’t delve too much into politics or the general state of the world. Mostly, we talked about interesting things. He told me that watching certain films had made him feel differently about his life, how when he wanted to cry he knew which songs to play on his phone. I wondered if this was an act – if he wished to appear sensitive, emotionally attuned – but in the end I didn’t care because the films and songs he referenced were all pretty good. I talked about my favourite sunsets, the ones I saw from the bus on my way home from work. I showed him pictures: the pink one with the big blue clouds, the one that glowed green through the rain. I told him I hated peonies and any flower you could put in a vase, that I liked plants to be ugly and wild. Giant foxgloves, cow parsley by the motorway. He said he had taught himself the phases of the moon and could always tell if it was perfectly full or starting to wane.
I knew that he found me endearing; I suspected he found me attractive. From time to time, I saw him looking directly at my mouth or at the line of my collarbone.
‘Do you have pets?’ he asked towards the end of the meal.
‘No, never.’
‘Thank God,’ he said.
He hardly mentioned his daughter, but men with children were often like that. Either they pretended that their kids didn’t exist, or they presented them to me like a gift, as though I ought to be terribly grateful that they might be willing to share. He paid for dinner and I didn’t protest. I told him I’d pay the next time and he mentioned some other places we could try.
The night air was fresher than usual, indigo blue instead of black. He asked me where I needed to go and if he could walk me there – he didn’t mind going out of his way. We said goodbye at the top of a flight of stone steps. He was warm and my skin was cool. I felt myself reaching up towards him; my palms tingled, as if dissolving. I kept thinking that if either one of us lost our balance then we’d both come crashing down. A few days later, he sent me a picture of a sunset where the sun was a bright copper circle – ugly, like a coin. –
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