When he'd given it to her, his somewhat alternative take on a Valentine, she hadn't realised that the song that it played was the Internationale, that famous Communist anthem. She had wound its tiny handle in a thousand revolutions, bewitched by her capacity to release its notes in drips and sprinkles, her flexing fingers a maestro's batons to its miniature cacophony of sound. Had she recognised its strident, martial tune, she might have also heard in it the crashing chords of his fanaticism, but its deceptive tinkling had masked from her these telling clues.
It was nearly eight years after he'd made this gift to her that Marge had called.
"Caitlin, it's Denis, they've found him, but..."
She'd sounded fraught, her voice a thinning thread of yarn, almost pulled too tight.
"Oh Cait, he's thrown himself off the Monument."
"Thrown himself? What Monument?"
"The London Monument, the one they named the tube for..."
Momentarily a silence had vibrated between them.
"Where is he now?"
"Oh God, Cait, this is really, really bad."
And so it had been. Really, really bad. The column's actual summit was of course closed off, thus preventing two hundred foot plummets by misadventurers and the melancholic from that bladder-hurting height. What Denis had done was scale the exterior, launching himself from the plinth at a fifth of the pillar's full elevation. Airborne for a few singing seconds, he had wheeled, a solitary phoenix, before being impaled on the railings below.
Marge had gone with her to identify the body, and as they had left a pinch-faced young woman had placed a small bag in her hand. She had come home and laid its sorry contents on the table before her, Denis's tragic few things, a pitiful panoply of sorrow and loss. Among them, she had found her tuneful little valentine, its presence among the tobacco, tickets and creased packet of rizla sending a jump of shock through her heart. She hadn't realised he'd taken it the day he'd disappeared, this tiny piece of her and him.
Throughout the troubled years of their relationship, he had repeatedly promised to encase his melodious metal offering in its own little musical box, but now she was glad that he hadn't, and she clutched its cold weight in her hand, it's timorous tune sweeping and circling, aloft in the sky of her mind.
Copyright © 2008 Rob Richardson. All Rights Reserved.