Eating Air

by Pauline Melville

  She felt uneasy about the incident even though no-one had seen her. Two weeks later she went into the supervisor’s office looking tearful and said, ‘I’m really sorry but I will have to leave. I hate to do this so soon after I’ve started. But my father is a Vietnam vet. He’s been in an asylum for ages because of what he saw out there. Flashbacks and stuff. He’s coming out now and my mom needs me to help at home. I really don’t want to leave. I’m so sorry.’

  *

  Hetty’s next job was as a receptionist for a large pharmaceutical company in mid-town Houston. She was a popular addition to the firm with her friendly grin and willingness to help.

  ‘Sure, no probs,’ she would say when asked to take over somebody else’s shift at short notice.

  The building was in a skyscraper complex built around a gigantic central paved patio; a dehumanised space where nobody walked. She worked on the twenty-seventh floor. Through the window Hetty could see a thousand windows glinting in the sun. The scale dwarfed humanity. Omaha seemed like hicksville in comparison. She spent more time than was strictly necessary in the ladies’ bathroom, with its shining sinks, its marble-clad floors and jasmine-scented air-conditioning. She liked flicking the mascara on her eyelashes in front of the mirrors there.

  Very soon she caught the eye of a middle-ranking married executive called Hank Stanton. She flirted with him but held him at bay. He developed a mild fixation on this new receptionist. When he was due to be transferred to London he asked if she would also like a transfer. He said he could fix it for her. A month later, Hetty was at the hairdressers in Ducane Street with a white towel around her neck, breathing in the sharp scent of astringent while having her hair streaked with ash-blonde highlights and undergoing a facial detox and manicure.

  ‘I’ve just been given a modelling contract in England,’ she told the beautician. ‘I’m really nervous. I hope I can do it.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine,’ the hairdresser reassured her.

  Two days later, Hetty sat in the JFK departure lounge. Hank and his wife had left for London two weeks earlier. Hetty arranged herself in what she considered to be a model’s pose. Her mother’s words echoed in her head: ‘This is real life, you know. This ain’t no dress rehearsal.’

  But Hetty was not bothered about any dress rehearsal. Life for her was just the lighting technical that would illuminate her in whichever pose took her fancy: glamour, grief, or heroism. For Hetty Moran, all virtue was a pose.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  On arriving in London after her love-struck visit to Preston, Ella hurried straight to class in Floral Street. Approaching the studio she could already hear music from the piano tinkling like ice cubes. She was late.

  For Ella class was a sanctuary. It had the simple austerity of a nunnery. The floor of the studio was plain blond wood. The barre reached around three sides of the room. The fourth wall consisted entirely of mirrors in which the dancers could watch and correct their positions. Some dancers fell in love with their mirror selves and always looked sideways at their reflection, but Ella used the mirrors only to straighten the line of an arabesque or correct the curve of an attitude. There was nothing flashy about her technique. It consisted of unerring simplicity, plus a sense of abandon. In class all concentration was on the body. Nothing ornamental or decorative obscured the shape of those bodies. The dancers wore no make-up. Their hair was scraped back with differing degrees of severity, giving them an air of chaste sexiness like acolytes of some Eleusinian sisterhood both ascetic and erotic. In the cloistered seclusion of the studio all secret passions, yearnings and furies were transmuted into dance.

  ‘I studied under Diaghilev,’ the elderly Russian teacher, who walked with the help of a silver-topped cane, was saying as Ella came in. Ella apologised for being late and took her place at the barre. ‘He taught us zat dancing is prehistoric. Animals dance. You are always half-way between ze animal and ze human. Dance is our craving for expression after we leave behind ze patterned instincts of animals. Here you think only with your body. We live only through ze body.’

  It was generally acknowledged that Ella was one of the most promising young dancers in the company. She had a tensile strength from knee to solar plexus to neck that gave her a near perfect geometric line. Her sense of balance was such that she rarely drifted a centimetre one way or the other, which would allow gravitational torque to pull her over.

  Cyrus was playing for the class that day. Above the piano in the corner hung a large portrait of Nijinsky painted entirely in various shades of blue and mauve, the legs muscled like sticks of blue plaited barley sugar. Cyrus nodded his head to acknowledge Ella. She warmed up briefly on her own before joining the class.

  ‘Petits battements and battus, please,’ shouted the teacher.

  Ella held onto the barre with her left hand. She enjoyed this exercise. It produced a delicious conflict of sensations. Standing on her left leg, right arm raised, right foot resting against the left ankle, she began the slow sensuous stretch of the top half of the body led by the arm, arching her torso first towards the barre and then sideways away from it. At the same time her right foot beat rapidly against the ankle of the left foot, fluttering like the wings of a baby bird. The teacher came over and adjusted Ella’s posture, pulling her thigh round a little.

  ‘Relevé,’ shouted the teacher, and the class rose obediently together. ‘Demi detourné.’ The class spun in unison to face the other way and repeat the exercise on the other side.

  For the next hour Ella subjected herself to the familiar pain of muscles stretched and worked to their limits. After twenty minutes her legs felt like lead weights. Before long she was coated in a film of sweat and feeling sick. She waited for the brief gap between each exercise which allowed her diaphragm to expand and contract, giving her back her breath. Her left calf seized up with cramp as barre work finished and the students moved to work in the centre of the room. She rubbed her leg and flexed it.

  During the arabesques the teacher’s eye was drawn critically to Ella as she struggled en pointe. Then came the enchaînement.

  ‘Lift zat left leg higher at ze back Ella. Higher. Higher. Keep ze back upright. Shoulders down. Now express something. Enjoy it. You must dance this enchaînement like you are a queen bee mating with ze sun.’

  Everyone was tired, sweating and panting by the time they came to the révérence at the end of the class. Some students stood and flopped over to let their arms rest on the floor. Others leaned against the barre with heaving ribs. Révérence was the expansive bow to each section of the audience with which every class ended.

  ‘Let zem see your neck,’ said the teacher. ‘In ze révérence ze audience want to see your neck.’ And she opened her arms elegantly, turned her head and leaned it backwards to demonstrate how to expose the neck. ‘It is possible to speak with a turn of ze hip too,’ she explained, ‘to walk in one direction towards a love in the grand circle box on one side of ze auditorium and suddenly turn teasingly away to someone in ze box on ze ozzer side.’ She demonstrated. ‘Leave ze turn of the head away from him until the last minute.’

  The class undertook a mass flirt as they turned from one side of the ‘auditorium’ to the other.

  ‘Good. Good. Class finished.’

  The students curtseyed their thanks and applauded the teacher.

  Cyrus collected up his sheet music as the dancers flocked past him up the stairs.

  ‘I’m not coming home just now,’ he said to Ella. ‘I’m going over to Richmond this evening to do two more classes and earn a bit of spondulix. You’ll have to tell me all about the tour later when I see you.’

  As he went up the stairs Ella asked:

  ‘Have you seen Donny since I’ve been away?’

  Cyrus avoided her eyes and looked coy as he ran his hand through his orange hair:

  ‘Oh. Crazy Horse. Lethally sublime Donny. The lame god of light. No, I haven’t.’

  *

  Ella’s black hair was still
wet from the shower. Fronds of it stuck to her forehead and neck as she climbed the stairs to her flat. At the top her heart made an extraordinary swivel inside her chest. Coming from inside Cyrus’s flat she could hear a tune being played tentatively on the piano. She stood still for a moment with her ear to the grubby cream-painted door. The smell of curry drifted up the stairs. Notes on the piano were being picked out delicately and slowly like someone exploring a thought. It was not Cyrus. Cyrus had gone over to Richmond. She held her breath and listened. There was silence. Then the music started up again. She knocked. The music stopped immediately. She knocked again. There was no reply.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said.

  The door opened suddenly. Donny stood there.

  ‘Oh it’s you.’ He wore jeans and his feet were bare.

  ‘Can I come in?’ He stood back and she stepped into the tiny flat, which smelled of curry and damp washing. Donny’s socks and a washed shirt were drying over the piano stool. There was a plate of half-eaten baked beans on the floor. She bent to move some clothes off the bed so that she could sit down, causing Donny to suffer the kind of sexual shock that can beset a young man confronted close-to with such a figure. Ella’s breasts were outlined under her nylon sweater, two delicate drooping bluebells above a slender stalk of a waist. He looked away, embarrassed and disconcerted.

  ‘Will ye have a cup of tea or what?’

  She noticed that he was snaggle-toothed. His top two front teeth crossed slightly at the bottom.

  ‘Please.’

  He whistled a jaunty tune and stood with his back to her, tapping his foot and looking through the window at the fire escape while he waited for the kettle to boil. She sat on the bed. He gave her the tea and settled down on the other bed with his legs stretched out and feet crossed, watching her drink. He leaned his head against the wall where the wallpaper was streaked with grey marks from head-grease. With his chin sunk into his breastbone he stared at her. She looked up from her tea and caught his gaze.

  ‘Is my hair a mess?’ She pushed the still wet strands of black hair away from her neck, tossing her head back so that her throat was exposed.

  It was then that Donny McLeod instigated that most delicate and subtle of courtships – courtship by insult.

  ‘You look like a piece of cheese after the rats have been at it.’

  Her eyes shot open with surprise. There was a pause.

  ‘You look like a gangster’s dog,’ he persisted.

  ‘No I don’t.’ She flushed and laughed, entering into the flirtatious spirit of it.

  ‘Could this be the face that sank a thousand ships?’

  ‘What a cheek.’ She puffed up with delight and her eyes shone.

  He leaned forward. Now there was a look of intense excitement in his eyes, and he watched her every move like a cat waiting for a crumpled ball of paper to be thrown. She finished her tea and put the cup on the floor. With each gruff insult, accompanied by a warm and mischievous glance, he edged nearer to her.

  Suddenly his leg was over her thigh.

  ‘And you’ve got a mouth like a plasterer’s bucket,’ he whispered, his breath tickling her ear so that she shivered with delight. She was giggling. There was a hand under her shirt moving up from the waist. The more grievous the insults he whispered into her ear the more she laughed. His voice had grown throaty and gruff. Rust-coloured sideburns scraped against her cheek. His lips had the bitter liquorice taste of roll-ups. His weight was on her. Something inside her was unspooling. Then came the tugging off of jeans and the throwing aside of shirts and skirts. The smell of him was the strong smell of a goat, and tumbling through her head went pictures of ungulates, fetlocks, horse-hooves, deer, goat-foot, hock-joints, amber eyes with elongated pupils and childhood pictures of Billy Goat Gruff. She dug her fingers into his back to gain some purchase on his body and struggled to achieve for herself that dark inner whorl whose spiralling sensation would culminate in a delicious cuntquake. It eluded her.

  They pulled on their clothes in silence. Donny sat on the bed and rested a green and gold tin of Old Holborn tobacco on his lap. He rolled himself a cigarette. Ella leaned back and embarked quite naturally on her first post-coital chat.

  ‘Cyrus had bad flu that first time I met you. He was off work for ages. He says he still feels wobbly.’

  ‘Ah, but that’s middle-class flu. That’s different. They can stay off work for six years ’cos what they’re doing is not very important.’

  ‘Is Cyrus middle-class?’ She pulled her black hair back and twisted it into a knot on top of her head.

  ‘Well he plays the piano as if he is.’ Donny blew a smoke ring. He offered her the tobacco tin and she shook her head.

  ‘Cyrus says you are a bit irresponsible,’ she said slyly.

  ‘Of course I am. Responsibility makes arseholes of us all.’

  ‘Why were the police after you?’

  ‘What we do sometimes, for a laugh, is we lie in wait for some raving punter who’s wandering around Soho. You can spot them a mile off. They’ve got that look in their eyes. We ask him if he wants to see a blue film or a live sex show. Then we take him up to the fifth floor of this derelict building and take the money off him and run down the other stairway. Turns out the guy that day was a policeman. He flashed his card and came after us.’

  ‘Cyrus told me that you planned to go north again to work.’

  ‘I just told him that. I don’t make plans. Plans are things that put a brake on your life. I just tell other people I’ve got them in order to shut them up. There’s cheese in the kitchen if you want it.’

  ‘Are you a vegetarian?’

  ‘Only when there’s no meat. I don’t like cheese. It’s like eating the sole of somebody’s foot.’

  ‘That’s what I like about you. Straight from the shoulder. No bullshit.’

  ‘Wrong again. I’m pure bullshit.’ He went over to feel his socks and shirt to see if they were dry. They were still damp. He pulled them on.

  ‘You’ll get pneumonia.’

  ‘No I won’t.’

  ‘You shouldn’t put that shirt on if it’s not dry.’

  ‘I’ve only got this one shirt. Which is OK ’cos I’ve only got one body.’

  ‘Why don’t you iron it dry?’

  ‘Because it would make me look too handsome.’

  He stood in front of the mirror and ran a comb through his hair.

  ‘In fact, I’m so handsome I might have to start stalking myself.’

  ‘Delusions of grandeur?’ Ella teased. ‘Maybe. But I bet my delusions of grandeur are better than anyone else’s.’

  ‘But you are good looking.’

  ‘No I’m not.’ He looked at her with an expression of amusement. ‘I’m just alive. That’s enough small talk. I’m Donny McLeod. Profound statements only, please.’

  He was looking round for his jacket.

  ‘Are you going then?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got a meeting somewhere in the city with a big bottle of wine.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m like a ship and I don’t like fucking limpets trying to stick to me. I have to keep removing them because they slow down my journey.’ He put on his jacket.

  She got up. He was moving towards the door.

  ‘Will I see you again?’

  ‘Of course you will. What’s your name again?’

  ‘Ella.’

  ‘See you tomorrow then, Ella.’

  He was gone and Ella, undone by the goat-hock ankle, began to love most what she could least possess.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  After he left, Ella let herself back into her own flat. The room had retained all the stuffy warmth of the afternoon sun. It was like walking into a block of heat. She went and looked in the mirror. Then she sat down on the bed. Her head felt as though it were on upside down. And something had happened to the floor. It had dropped. Her feet no longer seemed to touch it
. She felt fretful, as if something irrevocable had happened; that she had been branded and was no longer free. She went over to the window and flung it open to the warm evening air. An odd character, half musician, half tramp, was playing his recorder in the street below. Fastened behind each ear were two red carnations. Their long stalks swung like antennae as he moved his head. The fluting sound of his recorder spiralled upwards towards her. She looked down Old Compton Street. There was no sign of Donny.

  The flat Ella shared with Hetty consisted of one main room containing two single beds, one under the window and one against the partition wall. Ella slept under the window. The first thing she saw in the mornings was Hetty’s hand reaching out and fumbling for the pack of cigarettes on the floor. The girls had done their best to make the place cheerful. Both beds were covered with colourful patchwork bedspreads. A small circular table stood in the centre of the room. The tiny adjoining kitchen contained a Belling stove and, against all hygiene regulations, a toilet and bath.

  Before Ella went on tour there had been a minor spat between the two friends, when Ella found money missing from her purse. Hetty swore that she was just about to return it. Hetty didn’t really steal, she filched. She was so sunny in her treachery that Ella soon forgave her. Besides, Hetty could exhibit an easy generosity and affection when it pleased her. On one occasion she gave Ella a beautiful skirt and blouse that she no longer wanted:

  ‘Here, have these, honey. I really don’t need them.’

  Ella tried them on. A cigarette dangled from Hetty’s lips as she narrowed her green eyes to take stock of Ella in her new outfit.

  ‘Oh you look darling. They suit you.’

  Sometimes Ella was not sure where she stood with her friend. There was a feeling of impermanence about her; of insidious waters; a mosaic of sunlight wavering on the blue surface of a swimming pool.