Eating Air

by Pauline Melville

  ‘You gotta problem?’ asked the man.

  ‘You broke ma pal’s piano the other day. And I like to play piano.’

  The man looked at him with an impenetrable stare. Then he caught sight of Cyrus and a flicker of some half-remembered incident passed over his face.

  Donny made a grab for the packet in the man’s hand.

  ‘Is that heroin, is it? Och you shouldnae be doing that. That’ll do you no good at all. Give me that stuff.’

  It took the man an eighth of a second to pull the knife from the waistband under his shirt. The blade shone dully in the sun. Its point rested on Donny’s shirt, pressing into his stomach just above the navel. Cyrus and Ella stayed motionless. The street was busy. Passers-by streamed around the frozen tableau, oblivious to what was happening in their midst.

  ‘Don’t do that.’ Ella’s voice sounded tiny. They were in a cavern of silted time where everything had slowed down. The people passing by were in a different time zone where speed was still normal.

  And then something extraordinary happened. Donny became completely relaxed. With the knife still resting on his belly he smiled and opened his arms wide in a sort of invitation. As he held his arms outstretched, an almost tangible warmth flowed from him that seemed to engulf the other man. The man’s wrist trembled and then started to shake violently. Almost imperceptibly his hand began to turn downward, as if some invisible force were deflecting the blade away from Donny’s stomach. Donny continued to smile. The knife fell from the man’s grasp and dropped with a clatter to the pavement. The man fell to his knees. He was crying. Donny kicked the knife into the gutter.

  ‘Come on,’ said Donny. ‘Leave the cunt.’ The three of them moved on leaving the man on his knees on the pavement.

  ‘Where did you learn to do that?’ asked Ella later over breakfast.

  ‘I don’t know. Nowhere,’ said Donny.

  *

  Ella was at home darning the feet of her tights when she received a phone call from one of Hetty’s ex-workmates at Merkel, Sharpe and Dolme.

  ‘How is Hetty’s hearing?’

  ‘What?’ asked Ella.

  ‘Her hearing. You must know about that. That’s why she’s off work. She’s going deaf.’

  ‘What?’ Ella was shocked. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘She’s been off work having tests. It’s been going on for ages. Didn’t she tell you? When she was working here some of her friends tried to help. We practised with her while she learned how to lip read. Two of the girls in the office have even been learning sign language so that when she finally loses her hearing she can still communicate with us. She’s being incredibly brave.’

  That night, while they were sitting at the table, Ella asked Hetty about her deafness. Hetty breathed in sharply and held her hand to the top of her breastbone. The speed of her lateral thinking was dazzling. Her mind moved as fast as a scramble of spiders. She breathed out slowly. Her voice deepened.

  ‘Honey, I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t want to worry you when you were busy rehearsing. A while back I was diagnosed with a condition that causes progressive deafness. It’s incurable.’ She gave a little shrug, accepting her fate with no hint of self-pity. ‘Caused by a virus in the middle ear. But I’ve just discovered I’m going to be all right. I saw the consultant at the hospital today and by some sort of miracle it seems to be clearing up of its own accord, which is almost unheard of. The tinnitus is receding. It was pretty scary at the time.’ She sighed and looked at Ella with a rueful expression. ‘I never told you but that’s why Hank and I broke up. He didn’t want anything more to do with me. He couldn’t handle it. We’d planned to get married. He was going to divorce his wife. But he couldn’t cope with the thought of being with a disabled woman; having a deaf partner.’

  Hetty wiped her mouth with a napkin and pulled a small brave face. There were tears in her eyes.

  ‘Never mind. That’s life. The consultant wants to write up my case in some magazine called The Lancet. So maybe some good will come out of it all. How about us taking in a movie to celebrate my recovery? I’m so relieved. The girls at the office will be thrilled when they hear. They’ve been so sweet. Can you imagine me featuring in The Lancet as a medical curiosity? Now guess what sweetie. I’ve been introduced to Eric Clapton and been invited to go backstage to see him on his next tour.’

  Hetty’s first priority was to eradicate her own history by moving her story on to the next extraordinary episode. Hers was the peculiarly American belief that she could leave history behind and remake herself in whatever form she chose. When Ella told Donny about Hetty’s condition, the miraculous cure and Eric Clapton’s invitation, Donny’s forehead creased into a sceptical frown.

  *

  Cyrus no longer knocked on their door. He avoided the girls. They heard him chatting with friends through the partition wall, or caught the sound of his footsteps running up and down the stairs, but he no longer dropped in to see them. It had taken him a while to understand that an affair had developed between Donny and Ella. When he realised, his heart sank into the grey dead-dog realm of jealousy. In class his face was closed and tight-lipped.

  Ella, for her part, tried to adapt to Donny’s elusiveness. She never knew when he would appear or vanish. He would go missing for days and then suddenly turn up again at the flat laughing and joking and rolling his Old Holborn cigarettes. His sudden arrivals were as surprising as his unexpected disappearances:

  ‘Come with me. Quick. I’ve just seen this painting in the National Gallery. A Goya. You must see it, Ella. Quick. Put your coat on. We’ll go now. Now. Now.’

  *

  One night there was a violent storm. A long-haired Geordie youth with a pockmarked face rushed up the stairs at midnight to tell Ella that Donny was being held in the police box next to the all-night coffee stall at Charing Cross. There had been a fight.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Ah divvent kna. Someone starts arguing and jabbin’ two fingers into Donny’s chest. Donny went on a radge.’

  Ella threw on a coat and rushed down there, shouldering her way through the crowds outside the Whisky-a-Gogo. From inside the club she could hear a faint but frenzied drumming and the clash of cymbals. Gusts of rain swept over her like a yard brush as she ran through the streets. Her hair was plastered to her head. On the embankment by the coffee stall a large group had gathered. People watched, mesmerised, as the sturdy police box began splintering from the inside. Two policemen waited. Donny eventually emerged into the arms of the police in a halo of street lights and rain, with the dancing glint of rapture, bliss and brutality in his eyes that bode no good for anybody.

  ‘Christ. It’s like getting into a fucking beehive,’ he said, as he was shovelled into the hump-roofed Wolseley police car. He did not see Ella standing in the crowd. Two minutes later he was out again. The police had left the car door open while they answered some query from a passer-by. She watched Donny vanish into the night.

  *

  Donny strode alongside the river feeling triumphant; possessed by that moral anaesthesia which occurs immediately after a fight. The fight had been exhilarating, a burst of nonchalant savagery. Golden elvers of reflected light wriggled in the black water of the Thames beside him as he walked along the embankment. The downpour had stopped but the road was still wet. The sound of police sirens in the distance made him cross the road and head for the back streets. Violence was a purgative. It was his own personal violence for which he alone was accountable, a joyous explosion into a fight. His head was clear. His forehead stung. He felt refreshed and began to whistle as he walked along.

  *

  An enigmatic smile. Flawed topaz eyes. Bright sunlight and then the sudden darkening of the room. That night Ella dreamed that Donny appeared in her flat or some dark space that was also her flat. She was surprised and delighted to see him.

  ‘Whenever you are here I want to dance,’ she said. She raised her left arm in a tango or flamenco
gesture and experienced the slow burning pleasure of dance. She was flattered that he had bothered to come all the way from his strange northern country. Suddenly and unexpectedly, he too began to dance, shoulders moving, fists still furled. Just as suddenly he stopped and lay down. She realised he must be exhausted from the long journey and lay down next to him.

  *

  Cyrus recovered from his jealousy quickly and struck up a short-term friendship with a cheery young bar-tender with a fleshy behind who wore plum velvet flares. He would come round to Cyrus’s and they would smoke dope together after work. But Cyrus was still drawn to Donny and assuaged his feelings by becoming Ella’s confidant. She and Cyrus fell into the habit of drinking cups of tea and talking endlessly about Donny. They consoled each other by poring over what they knew about him, which turned out to be very little. He came from the north of Scotland. He had joined the army as a boy soldier at fifteen and then abandoned the army to go wandering. At one time Ella became so unhappy with his frequent disappearances that she thought of saving up her money and going away, but her hate was carved on ice and when Donny turned up again it melted with the spring sunshine.

  ‘Just give me some warning when you’re going,’ she said.

  He looked surprised:

  ‘I don’t get any warning myself.’ He spooned honey into his mug of tea and tried to explain. ‘Look. I’m a gallivanter. You can’t plan gallivanting. You can’t say, “In July, I’m going gallivanting.” It’s a thing that comes over you.’ He raised his arms and announced with mock theatrical panache: ‘People try to bind me but the bonds and withers just fall away from my feet. I ricochet between the azure vault and the gutter.’ Then he said with casual arrogance: ‘All the same, if it would make you feel better I will marry you. Would you like that?’

  ‘Yes. I would like that,’ said Ella, aglow with happiness.

  ‘And you can have the whole of the sky as a wedding present,’ he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Hetty had decided to house-sit for a friend in Muswell Hill. The wrecking of Cyrus’s flat had made her feel unsafe in Soho. When Ella visited Hetty to tell her that she and Donny were to marry, she found Hetty lying on the sofa with two circular moistened pads covering her eyes. Hetty groaned and got up to make coffee:

  ‘Oh God, Ellie, it seems I’ve been sleep-walking again.’

  Ella looked at her in surprise:

  ‘I didn’t know you did that.’

  ‘I haven’t since I was about six.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘I thought it was something I’d left behind. It must have been all that rumpus with Cyrus and the flat that triggered it off again. Here, have a doughnut.’ Hetty caught a drip of jam from her doughnut and licked her finger.

  The front room where they sat drinking coffee had an old-fashioned air. There were bamboo plant-holders dotted around containing tall leafy plants, a leather pouf, metal tongs, an old pair of bellows, a bronze toasting-fork and a poker all in the Victorian tiled fireplace. Behind Hetty’s head a Tiffany table lamp stood on an Indian brasswork coffee table.

  ‘That lamp is gorgeous,’ said Ella. Hetty turned to look at it. The lampshade had the brilliant colours of a dangerous insect: emerald green, creamy apricot and caramel. Hetty fingered the patterns, outlined in black like the markings on a butterfly wing.

  ‘I know. I might just have to take it with me when I go,’ she laughed. ‘Actually, Ellie, a policeman has just been round. It was pretty bad. Apparently, I was out in the middle of the road last night and had no idea.’

  Hetty picked up a card and showed it to Ella. On it was the telephone number and extension of Detective-Sergeant Alan Forbes.

  ‘The policeman was kinda cute. Dreamy brown eyes with long lashes. He didn’t have to come round. He came off-duty and told me what happened.’

  *

  At two o’clock the previous morning residents in the area would have been surprised to see an odd procession making its way along Muswell Hill Road. A young woman in an ankle-length, white nightdress walked steadily along the pavement followed by a small Panda police car driving at funeral pace just behind her. The woman was barefoot and the nightdress fluttered behind her under the orange sodium light of the street lamps. The stretch of road where she walked was long and deserted. Beside her, tall dark trees interspersed with silver birches loomed over the fencing that separated her from Highgate Wood.

  Every now and then the police car accelerated gently and drew ahead of the woman so that the bulky policeman in the passenger seat could twist himself round to study her more closely. He judged the woman to be about twenty years old. She had a sweet face and a firm chin, held upwards in a way that made her look both vulnerable and defiant. A river of dishevelled blonde hair fell to her shoulders. The police officer wound down the car window to take a better look. The breeze rushing through the tree tops immediately filled the car with a whispering sound like the distant sea. Some way off in the warm night could be heard the pop-popping of a Vesta motorbike. The girl looked neither right nor left. She seemed unaware of the dark whispered counsel of the trees beside her. The overweight officer felt a surge of protective lust.

  ‘What do you reckon?’

  D. S. Alan Forbes lifted his foot from the accelerator and allowed the car to drop back once more behind the woman. Forbes was of a slimmer build than his colleague. He had the square jaw, dark brown hair and conventional good looks of a male model in an old-fashioned knitting pattern.

  ‘Better keep with her,’ he said.

  The officer in the passenger seat took off his peaked hat. The rhubarb pink skin of his balding head was blotched with pale brown freckles. He rubbed his forehead to erase the indented line left there by his hat.

  ‘Yes. I wouldn’t mind a piece of that.’

  Forbes turned his head away. The salty whiff of shrimp on his colleague’s breath made him feel nauseous.

  The police telephone exchange had received an anonymous call from a woman saying she had spotted the sleep-walker when she was driving home. She had not liked to wake the woman because she had heard that waking a somnambulist ran the risk of precipitating a heart attack. She gave details of where the woman was walking and advised them to get there quickly. Six minutes later, the patrol car turned the corner and spotted the figure in white a hundred yards ahead of them. From a distance she looked like a walking candle.

  Suddenly, the sleep-walker veered left into a side street. The car followed. She went up the steps of a large house, pushed open the front door, went through and banged the door shut behind her.

  ‘Now what?’ Forbes was tired. During the day he was undergoing intensive training for his transfer to Special Branch. ‘We’d better wait for a few minutes and see if she comes out again. We ought to check on her and maybe advise her to go and see a doctor.’

  They sat in the car. Forbes could not wait to leave life in police uniform behind and become a fully-fledged member of Special Branch. The training excited him.

  He went back over the events in his training that morning. He had done well in the improvisation exercises, but then he had an advantage. Before he became a police officer he had started off as an actor with Hornchurch Repertory Company. When it became clear that he would never make much progress as an actor he left the theatre and joined the police force. In his initial training he became interested in the psychology of police work. They were trained to grin. They were trained to use humour and sympathy as a way of defusing tense situations. It was amazing how many cons came quietly after a friendly joke. He preferred that aspect of the work to the physical challenge of the dawn raid. He’d been on one or two of those and always hung back as far as possible. The time was chosen when people would be at their most vulnerable, four or five in the morning. The plan was to batter the door down and conduct what was called ‘twenty-five seconds of fury’ to terrorise the family. That usually shook them so much that the police could get what they wanted or carry off a suspect in his pyjamas. Alan Forbes decided that he wa
s better suited to infiltration and undercover work and applied for Special Branch.

  That day the Special Branch trainees had been encouraged to divulge any weaknesses they had in order that they could not be blackmailed. There had been a hilarious session when the new recruits admitted to all sorts of things: a history of shoplifting; carrying knives; using pornography; indulging in transvestism; all kinds of previous criminality. They were then trained to use those weaknesses as part of their operational kit. Trust exercises were set up – that sort of team-bonding was fashionable. A psychologist had come in to train them in the art of infiltration: ‘You have to gain the confidence of your prey. Share any intimate details of your own life; marriages, misdemeanours, infidelities, regrets and petty crimes. Make the subject identify with you. Identify with the subject. Appear to agree with the subject’s opinions, their politics, sympathise with them, laugh with them. Have an affair with the subject. That’s how undercover agents work. Now we will do some improvisations.’

  With his actor’s background, Forbes had excelled in the improvisations, pretending first to be a junkie and then a transvestite.

  The overweight police officer yawned and got out of the car to stretch his legs. He had put on unwashed socks that morning and his feet fizzed in his shoes like old yoghurt. After a minute he strolled up to the front door, radio in hand, and examined the flat numbers. Then he returned to the car.

  ‘The house is divided into flats. I can’t tell which flat she’s in. We’d have to wake everybody. Better send someone round in the morning.’

  ‘I’ll drop round myself,’ Alan Forbes yawned. ‘OK. Let’s go.’ The car reversed and made its way back to the end of the street, accelerating as it pulled away.