Pulse

by Julian Barnes

  When I divorced, my doctor friend Ben made me show him my hands. I asked if modern medicine, as well as using leeches again, was also going back to palmistry; and if so, whether astrology and magnetism and the theory of humours could be far behind. He replied that he could tell from the colour of my hands and fingertips that I was drinking too much.

  Later, wondering if I had been duped into cutting down, I asked him if he had been joking, or guessing. He turned my hands palm upwards, nodded in approval, and said he would now look out for unattached female medics who might not find me too repugnant.

  The second time we met was at a party of Ben’s; she had brought her mother. Have you watched mothers and daughters at parties together – and tried to work out who is taking care of whom? The daughter giving Mum a bit of an outing, the mum watching for the sort of men her daughter attracts? Or both at the same time. Even if they’re playing best friends, there’s often an extra flicker of formality added to the relationship. Disapproval either goes unexpressed, or is exaggerated, with a roll of the eye and a theatrical moue and a ‘She never takes any notice of me, anyway’.

  We were standing there, in a tight circle with a fourth person my memory has blanked. She was opposite me, and her mother on my left. I was trying to be myself, whatever that might be, and at the same time trying to make that self acceptable, if not actually pleasing. Pleasing to her mother, that is; I wasn’t bold enough to try to please her directly – at least, not in company. I can’t remember what we talked about, but it seemed to be going OK; perhaps the forgotten fourth helped. What I do remember was this: she had her right arm down by her side, and when she caught me looking in her general direction, she inconspicuously made the smoking gesture – you know, the first two fingers extended and slightly parted, the other fingers and thumb bent away out of sight. I thought: a doctor who smokes, that’s a good sign. While the conversation continued, I got out my packet of Marlboro Lights, and without looking – my activity, too, was at waist level – extracted a single cigarette, returned the pack to my pocket, took the cigarette by the filter tip, passed it round her mother’s back, felt it being taken from my fingers. Noting a slight pause on her part, I went back to my pocket, took out a book of matches, held it by the striking end, felt it being taken from my fingers, watched her light up, exhale, close the cover of the book-matches, pass it back behind her mother. I received it, delicately, by the same end I had given it out.

  I should add that it was perfectly obvious to her mother what we were doing. But she didn’t say anything, sigh, give a prim glance, or rebuke me for being a drug-peddler. I instantly liked her for this, assuming she approved of this complicity between me and her daughter. She could, I suppose, have been deliberately holding back her disapproval for strategic reasons. But I didn’t care, or rather, didn’t think to care, preferring to assume approval. Yet this isn’t what I was trying to tell you. The point wasn’t about her Mum. The point was those three moments when an object had passed from one set of fingertips to another.

  That was the nearest I got to her that evening, and for weeks to come.

  Have you ever played that game where you sit in a circle and close your eyes, or are blindfolded, and have to guess what an object is just from the feel? And then you pass it on to the next person and they have to guess? Or, you keep your guesses to yourselves until you’ve all made up your minds, and then announce them at the same time?

  Ben claims that once, when he played it, a mozzarella cheese was passed round and three people guessed it was a breast implant. That may just be medical students for you; but there’s something about closing your eyes which makes you more vulnerable, or drives the imagination to the gothic – especially if the object being passed is soft and squishy. In the times I played the game the most successful mystery item, the one guaranteed to freak somebody out, was a peeled lychee.

  There was a production of King Lear I went to some years ago – ten, fifteen? – played against a bare-brick backdrop, with brutalistic staging. I can’t remember who directed it, or who played the title role; though I do remember the blinding of Gloucester. This is usually done with the earl pinioned and bent back over a chair. Cornwall says to his servants, ‘Fellows, hold the chair’, and then to Gloucester, ‘Upon these eyes of thine I’ll set my foot.’ One eye is put out, and Regan chillingly comments, ‘One side will mock another; the other too.’ Then, a moment later, the famous ‘Out, vile jelly’, and Gloucester is pulled upright, with stage gore dripping down his face.

  In the production I saw, the blinding was done offstage. I seem to remember Gloucester’s legs flailing from one of the brick wings, though perhaps that is a later invention. But I do remember his screams, and finding them the more terrifying for being offstage: perhaps what you can’t see frightens you more than what you can. And then, after the first eye was put out, it was lobbed on to the stage. In my memory – in my mind’s eye – I see it rolling down the rake, faintly glistening. More screams, and another eye was tossed out from the wings.

  They were – you guessed – peeled lychees. And then this happened: Cornwall, lanky and brutish, stamped back onstage, tracked down the rolling lychees, and set his foot on Gloucester’s eyes a second time.

  Another game, from back when I was a hiccuping boy at primary school. In the morning break we used to race model cars in the asphalt playground. They were about four inches long, made from cast metal, and had real rubber tyres which you could roll off the wheels if you felt like simulating a pit stop. They were painted in the bright colours worn by the racing marques of the day: a scarlet Maserati, a green Vanwall, a blue … perhaps something French.

  The game was simple: the car that went the furthest won. You pressed your thumb down on to the middle of the long bonnet, pulling your fingers up into a loose fist, and then, at a signal, transferred the pressure swiftly from a downwards to a forwards direction, sending your car off into the distance. There was a certain technique involved in obtaining maximum propulsion; the danger being that the knuckle of your middle finger, held a fraction of an inch above the playground’s surface, would scrape against the asphalt, tearing skin and costing you the race. The wound would scab up, and you would have to adjust your hand, dropping the knuckle of the third finger into the danger area. But this could never produce the same velocity, so you went back to the usual, middle-finger technique, often ripping off the newly formed scab.

  Your parents never warn you about the right things, do they? Or perhaps they can only warn you about the immediate, local stuff. They bandage the knuckle of your right middle finger and warn against getting it infected. They explain about the dentist, and how the pain will wear off afterwards. They teach you the highway code – or at least, as it applies to junior pedestrians. My brother and I were once about to cross a road when our father put on a firm voice and instructed us to ‘Pause on the kerb.’ We were at that age when a primitive understanding of language is intersected by a kind of giddiness about its possibilities. We looked at one another, shouted, ‘Paws on the kerb’, then squatted down with our hands flat on the edge of the roadway. Our father thought this was very silly; no doubt he was already calculating how long the joke would run.

  Nature warned us, our parents warned us. We understood about knuckle-scabbing and traffic. We learnt to look out for a loose stair carpet, because Grandma had once nearly taken a tumble when one of her brass stair rods, removed for annual polishing, hadn’t been replaced properly. We learnt about thin ice, and frostbite, and evil boys who put pebbles and sometimes even razor blades into snowballs – though none of these warnings was ever justified by events. We learnt about nettles and thistles, and how grass, which seemed such harmless stuff, could give you a sudden burn, like sandpaper. We were warned about knives and scissors and the danger of the untied shoelace. We were warned about strange men who might try to lure us into cars or lorries; though it took us years to work out that ‘strange’ did not mean ‘bizarre, hunchbacked, dribbling, goitred’ – or howev
er we defined strangeness – but merely ‘unknown to us’. We were warned about bad boys and, later, bad girls. An embarrassed science master warned us against VD, misleadingly informing us that it was caused by ‘indiscriminate sexual intercourse’. We were warned about gluttony and sloth and letting down our school, about avarice and greed and letting down our family, about envy and wrath and letting down our country.

  We were never warned about heartbreak.

  I used the word ‘complicity’ a bit ago. I like the word. An unspoken understanding between two people, a kind of presense if you like. The first hint that you may be suited, before the nervous trudgery of finding out whether you ‘share the same interests’, or have the same metabolism, or are sexually compatible, or both want children, or however it is that we argue consciously about our unconscious decisions. Later, when we look back, we will fetishise and celebrate the first date, the first kiss, the first holiday together, but what really counts is what happened before this public story: that moment, more of pulse than of thought, which goes, Yes perhaps her, and, Yes perhaps him.

  I tried to explain this to Ben, a few days after his party. Ben is a crossword-doer, a dictionary-lover, a pedant. He told me that ‘complicity’ means a shared involvement in a crime or sin or nefarious act. It means planning to do something bad.

  I prefer to keep the term as I understand it. For me it means planning to do something good. She and I were both free adults, capable of making our own decisions. And nobody plans to do anything bad at that moment, do they?

  We went to a film together. I had as yet no clear sense of her temperament and habits. Whether she was punctual or unpunctual, easy-going or quick-tempered, tolerant or severe, cheerful or depressive, sane or mad. That may sound a crude way of putting it; besides, understanding another human being is hardly a matter of box-ticking in which the answers stay the answers. It’s perfectly possible to be cheerful and depressive, easy-going and quick-tempered. What I mean is, I was still working out the default setting of her character.

  It was a cold December afternoon; we arrived at the cinema in separate cars, as she was on call and might be bleeped back in to the hospital. I sat there, watching the film, yet equally alert to her reactions: a smile, silence, tears, a shrinking from violence – all would be like silent bleeps for my information. The heating in the cinema was underpowered, and as we sat there, elbow to elbow on the armrest, I found myself thinking outwards from me to her. Sleeve of shirt, sweater, jacket, raincoat, pea jacket, jumper – and then what? Nothing more before flesh? So, six layers between us, or perhaps seven if she was wearing something with sleeves under her sweater.

  The film passed; her mobile didn’t pulse; I liked the way she laughed. It was already dark when we got outside. We had walked halfway to our cars when she stopped and held up her left hand, palm towards me.

  ‘Look,’ she said.

  I didn’t know what I was meant to be looking for: proof of alcoholism, her line of life? I moved closer, and noticed, with the occasional help of passing headlights, that the tips of her first, second and third fingers had turned a pale yellowish colour.

  ‘Twenty yards without gloves,’ she said. ‘It happens just like that.’ She told me the name of the syndrome. It was a question of poor circulation, of the cold making the blood concentrate in more important areas and withdraw from the extremities.

  She found her gloves: dark brown ones, I remember. She pulled them on a little haphazardly, then meshed her fingers to push the wool down to the base of each finger. We walked on, discussing the film, paused, smiled, paused, parted; my car was parked ten yards beyond hers. As I was about to unlock it, I glanced back. She was still standing on the pavement, looking down. I gave her a few moments, decided something was wrong, and walked back.

  ‘The car keys,’ she said without looking up at me. There wasn’t much light and she was digging in her bag, feeling as much as looking for them. Then she added, with sudden violence, ‘Come on, you fool.’

  For a moment I thought she was talking to me. Then I realised she was angry only with herself, embarrassed by herself, and the more embarrassed that her inability to find her keys – and also, perhaps, her anger – were being witnessed by me. But I was hardly going to dock her points. As I stood there, watching her struggle, two things happened: I felt what I would describe as tenderness, were it not so ferocious; and my cock gave a sudden spurt of growth.

  I remembered the first time a dentist gave me an injection; he left the room while the anaesthetic took effect, returned briskly, slid his finger into my mouth, ran it round the base of the tooth he was going to fill, and asked if I felt anything. I remembered the numbness that strikes when you sit too long with your legs crossed. I remembered stories of doctors pushing pins into a patient’s leg without the patient reacting at all.

  What I wanted to know the answer to was this. If I had been bolder, if I had raised my right hand against her left, laid palm gently against palm, finger against finger, in some lovers’ high five, and if I had then pressed the tips of my first, second and third fingers against hers, would she have felt anything? What does it feel like when there’s no feeling there – both to her, and to me? She sees my fingers against hers, but feels nothing; I see my fingers against hers, and feel them, but know that she feels nothing?

  And of course I was also asking myself the question in a wider, more alarming sense.

  I thought about one person wearing gloves and the other one not; about how flesh feels against wool, wool against flesh.

  I tried to imagine all the gloves she might wear, both now and in the future – if there was to be a future I was present in.

  I’d seen one pair of brown woollen gloves. I decided, given her condition, to equip her with several extra pairs in different colours. Then, for colder days and nights, some warmer, suede ones: black, I imagined (to match her hair), with heavy white stitching along the fingers, and beigey rabbit-fur lining. And then perhaps a pair of those gloves like paws, with a single thumb and a broad pouch for the fingers.

  At work she would presumably wear surgical gloves, thin, latex ones offering the least barrier between doctor and patient – and yet any barrier destroys that essential feel of flesh on flesh. Surgeons wear tight-fitting gloves, other medical staff looser ones, like those you see in delis when you order ham, and watch slices peeled from the rotating blade.

  I wondered if she was, or would ever become, a gardener. She might wear latex gloves for light work in well-tilled soil, for sorting out rootlets and seedlings and delicate foliage. But then she would need a stronger pair – I imagined yellow cotton backs, with grey leather palms and fingers – for heavier work: pruning, forking the ground over, pulling up bindweed and nettle roots.

  I wondered if she had any use for mitts. I’ve never seen the point of them myself. Who wears them, apart from Russian sleigh-drivers and misers in TV Dickens? And given what happened to the tips of her fingers, all the more reason not to.

  I wondered if the circulation to her feet was curtailed as well, in which case: bedsocks. What would they be like? Big and woolly – perhaps some ex-boyfriend’s rugby socks, which would fall loosely around her ankles when she stood up? Or close-fitting and female? In some lifestyle supplement, I’d seen gaudy bedsocks made with individual toes. I wondered if I’d find them a neutral accessory, comic, or somehow erotic.

  What else? Might she ski, and have a pair of puffy gloves to match a puffy jacket? Oh, and of course, washing-up gloves: all women had them. And always in the same, brashly unconvincing colours – yellow, pink, pale green, pale blue. You’d have to be a pervert to find washing-up gloves erotic. Make them as exotic as you like – magenta, ultramarine, teak, pinstripe, Prince of Wales check – they’d never do anything for me.

  No one says, ‘Feel this piece of parmesan’, do they? Except perhaps parmesan makers.

  Sometimes, alone in a lift, I will run my fingers lightly over the buttons. Not enough to change the floor I’m going to, just
to feel the bumpy dots of Braille. And to wonder what it must be like.

  The first time I saw someone wearing a thumbstall, I couldn’t believe that there was a real thumb underneath it.

  Do the slightest damage to the least important finger, and the whole hand is affected. Even the simplest actions – pulling on a sock, doing up a button, changing gear – become fraught, self-conscious. The hand won’t go into a glove, has to be thought about when washed, mustn’t be lain on at night, and so on.

  Imagine, then, trying to make love with a broken arm.

  I had a sudden, acute desire that nothing bad ever happen to her.

  I once saw a man on a train. I was eleven or twelve, alone in my compartment. He came down the corridor, looked in, saw it was occupied, and passed on. I noticed that the arm he carried by his side ended in a hook. At the time, I thought only of pirates and menace; later, of all you couldn’t do; later still, of the phantom pain of amputees.

  Our fingers must work together; our senses too. They act for themselves, but also as pre-senses for the others. We feel a fruit for ripeness; we press our fingers into a joint of meat to test for doneness. Our senses work together for the greater good: they are complicit, as I like to say.

  Her hair was up that evening, held by a pair of tortoiseshell combs, then pinned with gold. It was not quite as black as her eyes, but blacker than her linen jacket, which had a fade and a crease to it. We were in a Chinese restaurant and the waiters were paying proper attention to her. Perhaps her hair looked a bit Chinese; or perhaps they knew it was more important to please her than me – that pleasing her was pleasing me. She asked me to order, and I chose conservatively. Seaweed, spring rolls, green beans in yellow-bean sauce, crispy fried duck, stewed aubergine, plain boiled rice. A bottle of Gewürztraminer and tap water.