He has his arms round her as they sway along to ‘Holding Back the Years’ and hers are around him. Her grey head is on his shoulder. It’s been nearly fifteen years since they embraced, but before that they slept in the same bed for almost forty years. He knows her body exactly, completely; the nape of her neck, her smell, her long narrow back with its spinal nobbles. Fifteen years is nothing. Time is nothing. Her wrinkles, his, are only variations in a long sameness. Seventy-year-old Sandra, seventeen-year-old Sandra: fundamentally identical. Here with her, he feels reconnected to forever. But she’s right, of course. Everything ends. This will. (This already has, legally speaking.) There’s no such thing as forever, at least in the sense of there being more and more time like this. Time is running out, and for once, strangely enough, perhaps exactly because he has Sandra in his arms, he can feel that it is. He can feel that the spinning golden carousel of lights that turns here with the two of them inside it, the spinning carousel of light that’s held his whole life, will sometime soon tilt away from him, or he from it. Either way it will angle away from him into the great dark, and turn on without him. Gary and Sonia and Vicky will have to cope without him; Priya will have to cope without him; the school, he supposes, will just have to cope without him too.
Not now, but soon. Not for years, maybe: but soon compared to the number of times he has already been around the sun, he and the city of London, a small grey spot on a rotating sphere travelling in a circle through a sleet of rays and particles. Soon compared to that. Soon too compared to the long history that the city has to come, which he won’t be around to see. The declines, the transformations, the rebuildings. The green porcelain architecture of future London in The Time Machine, which Alec has never forgotten: he won’t see that. Or the towers a kilometre high from which it will be possible to see the Channel gleaming in the sun. Or the shrunken half-drowned settlement ringed by steaming paddies. Or the ruins the New Zealander sees, having travelled half the world, as she sits on a broken pillar by Temple Bar. None of that. This was his time, and it’s nearly up. And then? And afterwards? Then there will be no more then. After, there will be no more after. But for now he goes on turning in the turning lights. For a little while longer, he is dancing with his wife.
Jo and Val
You can tell with all your senses, thinks Jo, that the unit isn’t anyone’s home, however long the inhabitants live here, including Claude; however likely it is that some of them will die here, including Claude. The carpets are more bristly than you’d choose for a real living room, the lights are more fluorescent, the chair cushions more solid and aggressively orange. They don’t exactly have visiting hours but the evening routine is beginning around her. The trolley with the wonky wheel is bringing around hot drinks and little plastic beakers of pills; the day staff are doing their handover and putting on coats. She ought to be going. Claude is visibly tired too. The window is closing for him being able to pay attention, the obsessions are reasserting themselves. He has been asking about Marcus and the radio station, a little random but perfectly fatherly. Now, without any change in his tone of voice, or apparently any sense of doing anything odd, he brings the Trilateral Commission into the conversation.
‘Pills, Mr Newton,’ says the night nurse.
‘I better make a move,’ says Jo. She drains the lukewarm last half-inch of her tea, and levers herself out of the orange chair. ‘I’ll just go and wash this up.’
‘You don’t have to,’ says the nurse.
‘No, I will,’ Jo says, from some vague feeling that if she rinses the mug it will make the place a tiny bit less institutional. Symbolically, anyway. She is always glad to leave, always guilty that she gets to walk out while Claude stays behind, medicated.
She carries her mug and his and two teaspoons through into the narrow kitchen that opens off the patient lounge. The instant coffee is in a catering-size tub, the teabags are in a Tupperware box. None of the mugs match. The biscuit tin has a sticker on top that says NEIL’S BISCUITS HANDS OFF. She washes up, she dries up, with a tea towel bearing a picture of Caernarfon Castle. There’s a window to the right of the sink that looks back into the lounge, and through it she can see Claude framed in his chair like a badly lit still life. His narrow quivering head, his big incurious eyes, the nurse still standing over him. Probably, the nurse is still there because he has not yet taken his pills. Probably, he has not yet taken the pills because he wants to go on talking. Probably, he is telling the nurse about Henry Kissinger. Yes; the nurse taps the pill pot arrested in Claude’s hand, and Claude reluctantly lifts it to his mouth.
And all of a sudden with the last mug still in her hand, a message comes through loud and clear from her psyche: this is an accident. There is no need for her life to have worked out like this at all. So many other possibilities. She could have stayed in LA. She could have had a solo career. She could have stayed in the band with Ricky, if he had been slightly braver. She could have married Ricky – and then, let’s not kid ourselves, been divorced by Ricky, and got that ludicrous white wedding cake of a house in Malibu in the settlement, and be living there now, eating egg-white omelettes and all-purple meals (for the anti-oxidants, you know) and showing off her collection of Fender guitars to rock biographers. Chance, that she came back to London, chance that she met Claude, chance that she taught for twenty years at Bexford Hill. How can this be her life, how can that be her love, if it rests on such accidents? Surely her real life is still waiting to happen. Surely she is still in the wings at the Pelican Club, waiting to go on, or running across the common with Val in her tam-o’-shanter, kicking at leaves. Surely the real thing has yet to come along.
Then just as suddenly, just as clear, she thinks: so what. Nobody chooses who they love. Possessing something, being somebody, loving anyone, it rules the rest out, and so it’s quieter than being young, and looking forward, and expecting it all, that’s all. The world calms down when your choice is made. That’s all. She puts away the last mug in the melamine cupboard, and goes to say goodbye to Claude.
‘See you on Monday,’ she says.
‘See you on Monday,’ he echoes, and watches her as she goes, puzzled, as if she knew something enormous that he does not.
But later, on the bus back from Woolwich to Bexford, it returns. Milder, this time, and more melancholic; a grief, a grievance, not a bolt of disbelief. On the top of the 54, up at the front, where she has always liked to sit on London buses, to get that stilt-walker’s sway, that giraffe-rider’s ungainly perch above the street. She supposes that at some point, when her hips go, she won’t be able to make it up the stairs. For now she can, though, and sits surrounded by changing crowds of teenagers, out for the start of Saturday night. White girls whose thongs show above the back of their low-rise jeans – God, what a stupid fashion – black boys with heads shaved into cryptic sigils, getting on and off in obedience to the invisible frontiers of the postcode wars. Kids young enough, now, to be easily the children of the ones she taught when she first returned, and to all of them her presence is an effective blank. She has no part in their very important games and they treat her as if she were invisible. They chat, catcall, shout, across and around the old woman with the white bob, the melanoma scar, the lips pressed together. Blotted lights of traffic and crossing signals float across the curved glass beside her, neon leaves on black water. Ahead, there is still a faint smear of light in the western sky, sunset remnants fading like a dim lamp behind stained glass. Brake lights stitch the way across Blackheath. Down the hill on the far side, and the panes of dim colour tip up and disappear behind the tree branches on the slope. By the time the 54 levels out at the bottom, the sky to the west – and the east, and the south, and the north – is the plain black static of the London night, fuzzed with sodium. Onward to Lewisham, and then the grind up the long, gradual slope to Bexford.
(Underneath Saturday night, underneath the fried-chicken shops and the billboards and the railway arches, the geology of the city persists on its own timetabl
e, scarcely scratched by the crackle-glaze of brick and tarmac spread over the top. Bexford, Lewisham, Woolwich: permanent-sounding names for gravel beds left behind by the river’s random swinging this way and that across a basin of clay between hills, for millions of years during which there were no names, no city, no humans. Here there was ice, pine forest, rainforest, tundra, ice again; over and over, and only in the very last iteration of the cycle, the faint grey thread of smoke rising from the first campfire, the first pinpoint of red in the London night. The city, the great city, is shallow lithography on the clay. The city is a mayfly veil.)
The 54 turns up Lambert Street. Her stop is by the old Woolworths; or rather, where the old Woolworths used to be, before a developer decided to rebuild it during the boom and then ran out of money, leaving a hole behind a board fence and a sentinel crane standing motionless. Jo is so used to the three-storey bulk next to the bus stop that her mind tends to fill its presence back in again whenever she isn’t actually facing the empty space, and so she keeps rediscovering that it isn’t there. As now, for example, clambering off the bus. Above the fence, Woolworths looms until she glances up, and then dissolves into instant nothing. It’s as if the building is flickering in and out of existence. The latest gaggle of oblivious teenagers whirl past, almost spinning her round: honestly, she might as well not be there at all.
What she minds, she thinks, setting off up the hill – what she minds, is that there is nowhere to put discord like this. Oh, she has love. She loves her son, and she loves Claude, the mad old fool, and she loves Val, and since she and Val set up house together when she retired, she knows there will be someone waiting for her when she turns her key in the door. All sorts of closeness; but with the way things worked out with Claude, there’s no one any more with whom to do that married thing of bringing home your discordant wants, deliberately bringing into the space between the two of you those awkward things which you find yourself wanting but can’t have. Can’t have, that is, without losing everything precious you do have. When she was younger, in the first years she and Claude lived together and he was still present more than he wasn’t, it was the awkward unruliness of desire she’d be dragging, quietly, into the indoor light. You meet a man you fancy, and you take care to mention his name, casually, in conversation at home, so that the thought of him can’t exist in a separate bubble of yearning, reality-proof, but must take its chances alongside everyday love: must endure the comparison, and be revealed as thin and greedy and impractical, and pop in the serious air between sofa and kitchen table. Now, it’s not wild desire she’d like to carry home to someone who, without even knowing, will make it measure itself against happiness and fall short. It’s that she chafes, secretly, like this; that she is finding, just now, when things are hard, how sharply it seems she can still regret the lives not had, the music never recorded, the fame not gained. Old sorrows she thought were long worked through – no, more than that, which she thought were actually abolished by her having had different desires fulfilled – turn out to be still capable, still bitter, able like ghosts to billow up and start talking, if given a drop of blood to feed upon. She stumps up the hill, and the unquiet ghosts say: Why only this? Why this life and not the other? Why this ending and not another? If she were laying herself down to sleep, nightly, in the envelope of warmth made by another body under the quilt, the warmth which is also trust, then the ghosts would surely be laid as well, banished to the far corners of the bedroom. But she sleeps alone.
Number 34 Pretoria Street. Edwardian brick set against the side of the hill, a little wrought-iron gate between box hedges, a path tiled in cracked red and black triangles. A terrace in Bexford, but a cut above the terrace in Bexford where she and Val began, six streets and seventy years away. The lights are on. She turns her key.
Music is coming from upstairs, something in the extended family of drum ’n bass. There are important differences, she knows, but it’s not her music and she doesn’t keep up with it. Since it isn’t her music, or Val’s taste either, that means Marcus is over. Ordinarily, she’d be delighted; just now, she feels tired, and doesn’t want anything else to happen today. There’s a call from upstairs – they must have heard the door – but she puts down her bag and hangs up her coat at deliberate old-lady speed, and goes into the kitchen, and inspects the lasagne through the oven door, and makes a meaningless adjustment to the oven temperature, procrastinating.
‘Jo!’ Oh, all right.
‘Coming.’
Because number 34 is built against the hillside, the way into the pocket-sized garden is through a French door in the upstairs sitting room. They’ve got it mostly covered in decking, and it serves as an external junkyard, neighbourhood pissoir for cats and place for Val to smoke, more like a New York fire escape than a Californian terrace. And not only is Marcus there, so is his boyfriend Lucius Guneratne, a doe-eyed sound engineer whose parents came from Sri Lanka. Both of the Romans, as she and Val call them. And all three of them are smoking, the hot points of their fags brightening and dimming, with Val enthroned on a garden chair and lounging male prettiness flanking her on both sides. Three grins turn towards her.
‘You’ll never guess what,’ says Val. ‘You’ll never! Come and listen to this …’
But Jo, without a run-up, without any appreciable pause or intermission, is infuriated. The nagging ghosts of what might have been have played at Chinese whispers in her head, waking a more ancient ghost yet. I’ve been doing the looking-after, cries this resentful spectre, and Val’s been having fun with boys. Look at her, sitting with them, sucking up to them, laughing at their jokes, while I do the hard stuff! It’s not fair! It doesn’t matter that the Val in front of her is a pensioner roughly the shape of a fire hydrant, with a face as lined as a prune and a chestful of phlegm that pops and crackles as she laughs. It doesn’t matter that these boys are Val’s nephew and his true love, as queer as a three-pound note. It doesn’t matter that by all reasonable calculations Val has less than her, has done altogether less well out of life than she has. Reason has nothing to do with it. It’s the complacent smirk she can’t stand – the same, dammit exactly the same, as the one that twelve-year-old Val would have plastered on her face as she sat on the climbing frame on the common in a crowd of male cronies, even at that age making sure her dress was pulled up to show off her legs. The same smirk the nineteen-year-old one would be wearing when she sidled in at midnight to a house where Jo had been playing nurse all evening, lipstick smeared, clothes rucked, thoroughly and demonstratively snogged.
‘Go on, Loosh, run it again from the beginning,’ commands Val. She pats the seat next to her.
‘Look at you,’ Jo says bitterly. ‘Don’t you ever learn?’
‘What?’ says Val.
‘It’s always men with you, isn’t it. Always the men that come first, no matter what it costs. But you don’t care, do you, ’cause someone else always pays.’
‘Love …’
‘I mean, Lucius, d’you even know? Do you even know who you’re sitting next to?’
The boys look at each other.
‘Don’t,’ says Val, urgently. ‘Oh, please don’t, love.’
There is such need in her sister’s voice that Jo’s angry ghost reels and melts, leaving her with no justification but still a headful of bad feeling, a wail of complaint with nowhere to go. She puts her hands in the air and makes a kind of clawing pass over her own skull, a gesture of impotent – something – that ends by her clapping her fingers over her mouth.
‘Ma!’ says Marcus. ‘Are you all right?’
But it’s Val who steps forward and gathers her into slabby arms.
‘Give us a minute, lads,’ she says. ‘Go on in for a bit. Please.’
Frowning, puzzled, they do go in, and a minute later turn off whatever-it-is.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jo whispers. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’
‘Never mind that,’ says Val. ‘What’s up? Did something happen?’
‘No
,’ says Jo wretchedly.
‘No?’
‘No, it was just the same as ever.’
‘Oh, right,’ Val says, as if Jo has explained something: though if she has, it must have been in the way she said the words, not the words themselves.
‘I just – couldn’t – bear …’
‘Yeah,’ says Val.
‘It’s just – so …’
‘Yeah,’ says Val.
‘It’s all …’
‘I know what you mean, sweetheart,’ says Val, ‘I know what you mean.’
‘Well, I’m glad you do, because I bloody don’t.’
‘Shurrup,’ she explains. ‘Shurrup and have a cry.’
‘That won’t make it any better. How will that make it any better?’
‘It won’t make it better. It’ll make you feel better, that’s all.’
Sniff.
Sniff.
‘Okay now? Didn’t that help.’
‘Maybe a bit.’
‘Shut up. Have you got a tissue?’
‘Somewhere. Yes. Listen, I’m so sorry. You didn’t do anything to deserve that.’
‘Well, not recently.’
‘It was like … something started talking out of my mouth.’
‘No, love, come on, that was you. If I ever learned anything, it was: you got to own up to the ugly. You do. Come on. We wouldn’t be sisters if we didn’t hate each other just a bit, now and then.’
‘You mean, you too?’
‘Oh God, yes. Mrs Up-Herself Musician Lady. You’re a moody cow. Horrible to share a house with. And you’re so fucking thin.’
‘Well, all right, then.’
‘I could go on.’
Light Perpetual Page 28
