Afterward she would sleep, curled up like a child, the profile of her little face angelic, her dark curls profound and archetypal against the pillow. Alexander would lie on the bed beside her, reading until after midnight, pausing every now and again to admire her, to monitor her breathing.
She woke one night in shock, perhaps from a bad dream, and, seeing an apparently strange man beside her in the bed, was filled with fear. She recoiled from him with a whimper, her face contorting into deep-wrinkled horror, then realised in the next moment that it was Alexander, her very own lover, and the fear flowed instantly to earth, leaving behind it a sleepy smile and a melting body, which then launched itself forward for a hug, arms reaching up to him, before drooping back again into the warm indentation on the pillow, the hollow of cosiness under the quilt.
In the morning she didn’t recall the episode, and possibly had never really woken.
Four years later, after the betrayals on both sides, big and little, the split, the long period of anger and coolness, having found each other again, they moved in together – earnestly this time.
A few months into the new arrangement, Alexander returned very late one night, at three or four o’clock, thirty quid richer in heavy coin from a game of poker. He was sober. He hadn’t been drinking that night. It was unusual for him to be up so late and not be drunk. He moved quietly through the flat in order not to wake her, was especially careful in opening the bedroom door, but it squeaked, and a board creaked under his foot, under the brown-sauce carpet. Julia awoke. She lifted herself up in the bed. From the light he had left on in the passageway, he could see her face, her peering expression, which flared in alarm at the sight of this tall, unknown man approaching her.
‘It’s OK, it’s me.’
She frowned in apparent irritation, her torso shuddering, then slumped back wearily. He sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her hair, said soothing words as she settled herself to sleep again. She didn’t resist these attentions, but neither did they move her.
From where he is now lying, it is less than ten feet to the French windows that look out onto the back garden he shares with the other tenants. Julia always thought it was odd to have a bed next to such windows, and probably the room did not originally serve as a bedroom. She liked to keep the curtains drawn. The windows are not closely overlooked by any of the neighbouring houses, but it was always possible, she argued, that one of their housemates would come down into the garden and peep in. Within a week of her departure, Alexander opened the curtains and hasn’t closed them since. The condition of the flat may have deteriorated somewhat, but every morning the light comes spilling through the back windows into the bedroom. On clear days, he wakes with pure sunshine on his face.
He likes to look out. The back garden is another of the things that is keeping him in the flat. Her smell. This view. The fact that he doesn’t have to move in order to live here.
The garden is dreary enough to the unpractised eye: the concrete yard, the untidy lawn, the ageing orange clothesline in its drooping arcs (on which the country girls from upstairs hang out their washing), the ivy-covered perimeter walls, the wooden door to the lane at the back. From his lying position on the bed, he can see over a side wall into the neighbouring garden where there are tall bushes and big deciduous trees, wiry and interesting now in their winter bareness. And out past the bottom wall, if he sits up, he can study the back of the next row of redbrick houses, all the misshapen kitchen and bathroom extensions, the ugly windows, the spinal drainpipes and settled slate roofs.
It is precisely the ordinariness of the garden that he appreciates: the microcosm jungle of the lawn, with weeds and grasses living peacefully side by side in the quiet winter months, the sodden muck, the shiny moss, stalks of dead wild flowers, voyaging snails, lost worms, birds on the lookout for a decent bite. And the concrete yard looks well after a downpour. Even the big City Council bins are redeemed in their rain-splashed condition. Behind them, a stack of planks forgotten by the landlord continues to rot happily, a feeding ground for creepy crawlies that hide away, out of sight of predators.
On the clothesline, a solitary red-breasted robin is sitting alert, body and eye movements bright and rapid.
Enter a cat stage left, moving in a low crouch along the top of the side wall. It jumps down onto the lawn, which causes the robin to spring into the air, twittering, and flap its way neatly to the nearest branch of the nearest tree, which is a beech, where grey doves live, dozens of them.
Alexander is becoming familiar with this cat. He has seen it a number of times in these last months. He doesn’t know if it is male or female. He thinks it is not young in cat terms.
The cat is black, with white patches on its paws and from its throat down onto its breast. It trots purposefully across the wet grass to the couple of steps that drop from the lawn into the yard. Pausing here, it glances at the area around the bins, including the planks, continues its progress down the steps, and pauses again for a more general survey of the environment: listening with its pointy ears, raising its delicate nose and whiskers, angling its head to catch whiffs on the air. The little skull, the green slit-pupil eyes perform a scanning motion. It spots Alexander. Through one of the squares
in the window, which frames its face, the cat stares in at him lying full length in the bed.
Unintentionally, Alexander finds himself in a staring contest, which he is unprepared for and quickly loses. He shakes his head to throw off the humiliation, then laughs at himself and confronts the cat again with more and comical resolve.
‘Get lost. I don’t like cats.’
But the cat appears to take this as an invitation. It walks with great precision across the yard, advancing directly to the window, its tail snaking up into the air behind it in a question mark. It stops right in front of the window, front paws parked side by side. Head and shoulder reaching upward, it looks intently at Alexander in a demeanour that he finds surprisingly engaging. In these moments he experiences the cat as inquisitive, cheerful, even sociable.
‘Hey, you’re a cool dude,’ he says, admiring the line of its body from the throat to the little paws, the claws of which are slightly splayed. The cat begins to lick the white fur on its breast, brushing it down and outward with its pink tongue. The furry breastplate seems to Alexander like a decoration, like ruffles on a dress shirt.
All his life, unconsciously following his mother’s training, Alexander has claimed to dislike cats, indeed has actually disliked them. But now, in these instants, he is set free from this prejudice.
‘Maybe I like cats after all,’ he says to the cat, and this realisation releases in him a little shot of the chemicals of love, which lifts him above his anxieties. His head drops gratefully to the pillow.
When he turns to face the window again, the cat is gone.
His hand gropes on the floor for his mobile. He finds it and sees that he has left it on all night, which is bad because the microwaves might be frying his brain while he sleeps, but good because he doesn’t have to go through the tedious routine of switching it on, entering his PIN, waiting for it to find the network and get the contacts up and running. He seeks out Grace S M and rings her, feeling fear in his stomach.
‘Yes,’ she answers coldly.
‘Are you at your place? I was thinking of calling around to see you.’
‘Why?’
‘We need to discuss our project.’
‘You mean you want to lick my cunt.’
‘That too. . . . I’m having a good morning here. There’s a cat in the back garden who is my new friend.’
‘He’s not your friend. He’s just looking for milk.’
Having spoken to her, he needs to get out of bed.
Naked except for the ripped old T-shirt he likes to sleep in, scratching his balls, yawning nervously, he moves through the flat, looking for his cigarettes.
It surpris
es him that they are not in the sitting room, on the floor in front of the sofa in the ever-expanding space that functions as a platform for all the stuff that one requires or has finished with when one is lying full stretch on the sofa watching television, head propped on a cushion on the armrest, flicking endlessly with the remote control from one piece of shit to the next.
It surprises him less that his cigarettes are not in the kitchen, since he wouldn’t normally leave them there. As he passes through on his way to the toilet, he automatically lifts the kettle to determine by its weight if there is sufficient water in it, and finding that there is, hits the button. There is enough water, but not much, so he hears immediately the hiss of the electric element beginning its work as he moves on.
His cigarettes and lighter are sitting on top of the toilet cistern. He lights one while he is having a piss, and worries about his low piss pressure. His piss pressure has really deteriorated in the past few years. Back in the good old days, with a few pints in him he could have pissed over a ten-foot wall. With ease he could rip apart cigarette butts in urinals within a couple of seconds of targeted shooting. He could also drink all night before going to the toilet, whereas now he is going already after the first pint. Perhaps this is the root of the issue. Reduced storage capability means reduced pressure. This is a new thought. Up to now he has regarded piss pressure and storage capability as separate characteristics, but perhaps they are linked, one the cause of the other. In any case, his pissing nowadays is notable only for inglorious reasons: frequency, limpness, bizarre coloration. He was deeply alarmed recently when he noticed that his urine was bright green, neon-light green. This was where the true magnificence of the internet became apparent. He has only begun to draw on it these past eighteen months or so, particularly since Evil Neville had recommended to him a search engine called Google. He used it to check out his condition – bright green urine – and got a good supply of links, the first few of which were sufficient to inform him that the symptom was due to the vitamin B in the supplements he had started taking.
Alexander stands there, dick in hand, and draws on his cigarette, hoping that he isn’t dying of prostate cancer. He worries about his health these days, a lot more than he used to. He is noticing in his body all sorts of tics and throbbings, pains, sensations, quiverings. In his mind he has catalogued three possible explanations for this: (i) his health has deteriorated rapidly since Julia left; (ii) his health was always poor, but he didn’t have the mental space to notice it; (iii) his health is fine but he is going bonkers.
His mobile phone rings, very faintly because the sound has to travel from the bedroom. He decides not to run for it. He is not in the mood for rushing, and anyhow it will surely have rung out by the time he gets there.
Back in the kitchen, he empties last weekend’s coffee sludge from the cafetière onto a dirty plate.
He finds that no one really cleans the flat now that Julia has left. This leads to an accumulation of dirt and mess, which may be disgusting for the outsider, but which he can experience as perfectly natural. The conditions occur organically, and he works around them. It is possible to wash out the cafetière without disturbing the complex mound of dirty dishes in the sink. There is no difficulty in finding the coffee because it is just where he left it a week ago, beside the kettle – a great place to leave the coffee, if you think about it. From the stale loaf of batch bread beside the toaster, he can easily pull out two slices, pinch off the blue mould at the edges, pop in the bread. Actually the toaster is a little too small for batch, but the dial is at max and he can turn the slices around mid-cycle to do the other ends. And the advantage of never putting the butter back in the fridge is that it always spreads beautifully.
I’m a poet, he thinks. A poet is someone who enjoys the ballet of breakfast. There was never any ballet with Julia, just a never-ending supply of domestic chores.
In the waiting period for the toast (having flipped it over at roughly half-time) he makes the long trek to the bedroom and picks up his mobile phone to review the action. There is one missed call from Danny, one text from Danny: Boy sprog dropped this morning. Pints with Paul tonight. Meet holles street hospital at 7.30. Ask for ward.
Alexander finds himself uninterested by this addition to the global population.
On Pearse Street, standing on the pavement outside Grace Sharkey’s apartment block, waiting for her to buzz open the external door, he catches the eye of a smack-head chick, a pale pimply girl of seventeen or eighteen with reddish hair and light brown eyes of almost orange tinge. She has no coat on. Her ribcage is high, her waist thin. She is a lovely wasp of a thing; in the early phases of her heroin career, blooming in it; deeply switched on at this very moment, luxuriating in her oozy low.
She lingers in the eye contact with him as she walks by. Her lips make a tiny pouting motion. I would do you, she is saying. Or perhaps she is mocking him, his dreary life, she who has the very truth running through her veins.
The girl is accompanied by two others, following loosely behind her – a tall physically powerful young man and another girl, smaller, prepubescent and obese. The man is saying something humorous that is intended to be heard by both his companions. His eyes laugh with ego evil. He moves in a mannered macho gait, the promise of violence in every gesture, in the rings on his fingers, in the tattoo at the side of his thick neck. Alexander loathes and fears this type of animal, finds his existence itself a promiscuity, a superfluity.
‘What the fuck are you lookin’ at? Do you wanna dig in the head?’
He has taken a stride out of his way to confront Alexander, who is now cornered, his back to the apartment block entrance, threatening male to one side of him, enticing chemically accentuated female to the other. She has stopped to watch. Her eyelids slip down halfway for an instant, as though temporarily too heavy for her to carry.
Alexander holds up his palms in a gesture of peace.
The youth’s head and torso spring forward and he growls at Alexander, exactly as a dog would, his mouth stretched open, several inches of his wet tongue visible, as well as the accumulated plaque on his teeth. Alexander falls backward, banging against the heavy glass door, then bolts along the wall in the direction his attackers have come from. He doesn’t dare look back, but can hear laughing and shouting behind him.
‘Faggot,’ the voice calls.
Alexander is sorry to have disappointed the girl, to have behaved in such an unmanly fashion. Heart beating fast, hands sweating, he keeps walking for a couple of minutes, back in the direction of Ringsend, before turning around and returning to Grace’s apartment.
Earlier, he pressed the button once and waited politely while she ignored him for several minutes. Now he presses it three times, two long insistent pushes followed by a third, which he holds for a good fifteen seconds and is still holding when she interrupts through the intercom.
‘What the hell is wrong with you? I’m in the bath. Come back in half an hour.’
‘Open the fucking door, Grace. I just got accosted by the natives, some of your neighbours.’
‘Did they beat you up?’ she asks, a new, hopeful tone in her voice.
‘They mauled me psychologically,’ he replies, more lightly.
‘But isn’t that what you like, dear?’
She buzzes him in.
He takes the lift to the top floor, and tries to recall how many times he has already made this journey. This is his fourth visit, or his fifth perhaps, spread out irregularly over the months since their first encounter.
Grace has the penthouse apartment, with expansive views over Dublin: Trinity College and the Central Bank, Wood Quay, Christ Church and St Patrick’s, the tower in Smithfield, Phoenix Park – these familiar central landmarks; and scores of church spires and cranes, thousands of city rooftops, running west toward the Midlands and south to the Wicklow Mountains, which seem within a stone’s throw when the day is clear.<
br />
On his previous visits, after the sex, he has liked to lounge around in one of the twin window couches, enjoying the views, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, weathering Grace’s efforts to get rid of him.
‘Can you go now please?’
Or: ‘OK, that’s enough. Get out of my sight. You irritate me.’
The door is open, which isn’t usually the case. He finds himself exercising caution as he enters, as though he anticipates a trap: a bucket of pig’s blood balanced over the door; or, more likely, a new-generation anti-personnel mine that will blow off his legs without damaging the decor. But he discerns no threat as he proceeds over the rich cream carpet into her inner territory. Once inside, he turns and carefully closes the door, making a momentary childish game of doing this soundlessly.
Along the corridor, the bathroom door is open, with a thin cloud of steam rising out into the hall, floating up to the ceiling. He can hear the bath running, the throaty noise of the water pushing through the pipes, out through the taps, the heavy splash and commotion as the rushing stream collides continuously with the churning body of water beneath.
On the floor against the skirting board on the near side of the bathroom door is a fat dark-wood Buddha with several bellies and a very round head. It is the only object of any sort in the entire silk-upholstered corridor. It captures his attention every time; and each time he studies it, he has the feeling that it is laughing at him.
Still elevated on adrenaline from the encounter outside, wanting to express himself physically to exorcise his cowardice, perverted by a wave of self-revulsion, and conscious also of the silence of his entrance and of her immediate vulnerability (if she is indeed in the bath), the thought occurs to him that he could murder her now, indeed that he should murder her. He indulges this whimsical fantasy. He could quietly lift up the laughing Buddha, carry it into the bathroom and smash her head with it. The Buddha is certainly heavy enough for the job and would be a pleasing weapon, though probably too unwieldy. It would be better for him to find something else. Not a knife or a cleaver: he’s not that type of murderer. But he could certainly strangle her with his leather belt. That would be appropriate.
Being Alexander Page 11
