Eating Air

by Pauline Melville

  However gently she woke him, he always jumped awake with a terrible start as if the death-boat were coming. He endured endless and frightful headaches. Because of the headaches he couldn’t bear to have the light on when they watched television. She had to do whatever she needed to do by the light of the telly. But then she too had aching muscles, and her feet were sometimes bruised and bleeding. She would lie on the sofa next to him with her head on his shoulder and feel his arm around her, his shirt gritty with dust, the acrid smell of sweat wafting over her as they lay half asleep in front of the television. Sometimes they lay like that all evening, dozing, waking and dozing off again.

  Ella looked down at him asleep on the floor sprawled against the wall. She tied her wrap-around cardigan more tightly around her waist. Then she went into the kitchen and put his meal back in the oven. She was still wearing her black footless leggings from class as she stood at the sink in the bruised light of evening. Staring down into the sink she was amazed to discover angels’ wings amongst the potato peelings.

  *

  ‘Is Donny going on strike?’ Hector asked Ella.

  He had arrived back from Milan sporting a white shirt and fashionable striped tie with a big seventies knot. He was setting off for the launderette with a black plastic bag full of washing. ‘One-and-a-half-million workers will be on strike tomorrow. Are you joining them?’

  He smiled and points of light danced in his eyes. She thought how different he was from Donny.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Ella looked doubtful. ‘We’re doing Romeo and Juliet.’

  *

  Donny did go on strike the next day, and the day after that, and for several more weeks he continued to strike all on his own when everyone else had gone back to work. He drank bottles of wine and watched old black-and-white movies on the television. One day he took off for the Tate Gallery. Strolling around he came to an area cordoned off from the public. He slipped through an empty gallery and found his way down a flight of stairs to the dimly lit basement warehouse where thousands of paintings were stored. Around him lay dozens of canvases framed and unframed. For a while he wandered amongst them. Then he came across one particular painting that caught his attention. He sat down on the floor to gaze at it. It was a painting of a large black panther with yellow eyes surrounded by scarlet and purple fruits. Donny was hypnotised by it. He leaned back against two crates that had been used to transport the paintings. He snoozed. Somehow the alarm had been set off. Guards searching the building discovered Donny asleep, legs stretched out in front of him, with one arm hanging casually over the frame of a painting. He was surrounded by large members of the cat family, as if he lay in the feline embrace of spotted, striped, and amber-eyed jaguars, leopards, tigers, lynxes and cheetahs. He was escorted off the premises.

  Another day he phoned Ella from the zoo.

  ‘I’ve discovered what animal I’m like. An ocelot. It’s just the same as me. It’s hiding behind a tree looking at people.’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Whenever Mark Scobie returned from Italy he signed on the dole and immediately set about working on Claimants’ Union business. He wrote and printed out pamphlets and attended meetings. He kept the door of his room upstairs locked. Occasionally he would come and talk to Donny. He had the habit of pushing up his heavy black-rimmed spectacles with his thumb, revealing the indentation they left on his nose. Sometimes Donny would go downstairs to the basement when Mark was printing out stuff on the Gestetner and lean in the doorway with a mug of tea while they chatted. Mark’s waxen pallor highlighted his intense manner.

  ‘I was married,’ Mark explained in his soft voice. ‘But marriage didn’t fit with what I believed or what I was doing.’ He tried to explain his actions to Donny.

  ‘I told her, “I’m sorry, but I’ve come to realise that the institution of marriage is utterly against my principles. It’s a fundamental building block of capitalism; a system that I loathe and despise. I want to dedicate myself to overthrowing it. It deforms us all. I can’t stay married and be true to my beliefs.”’

  Donny looked at Mark with suspicion. He stubbed out one cigarette, lit another and changed the subject.

  ‘Listen, Mark, what we were talking about earlier … fund-raising, you call it. Robberies, I call it. If I do what you are suggesting you’d better understand that I’m organising it. Anything I do, I do on my own or with someone of my choosing. I take responsibility for myself and no-one else. I don’t trust anyone. Other people let you down. I’ll carry it right through. I know someone who can fence the stuff in Germany. You can have the money. I don’t care about that. I’d just do it for the craic.’

  Mark took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. He wore jeans and an ill-fitting black leather jacket. For the first time he broke into a shy smile.

  ‘Thank you. You see we want the politicians and judges and businessmen to experience directly the consequences of their actions. They get away with everything. You’ll be helping in a good cause. It’s about justice really. But we need funding.’

  Donny replied with casual insouciance, flicking his ash on the floor.

  ‘Fuck your fucking causes. What’s justice anyway? Revenge in a suit and tie. I don’t want to make the world a better place. What would I be against, then? I don’t want the money. I just want to see if I can do it. That’s all. You can have the money and do what the fuck you like with it. You can buy all the guns you like and have as many revolutions as you want. I don’t give a shit. OK? Think about it.’ He looked at his watch. ‘But right now I’m away to watch Monty Python on the telly.’

  Donny loved television. He was transported by it. His infectious laugh could be heard all over the house. He lost himself in it. He was married to it.

  ‘I watch television until I am hypnotised into nothing,’ he said.

  When the end of the day’s programmes was signalled by an ever decreasing dot of light on the screen, he used to sigh with bitter fury and say: ‘Well, that’s it. Everything’s dead now. Another fucking day of torment to be faced.’

  Sometimes Donny would come home at two or three in the morning and shake Ella awake. His destructive vitality was unflagging. He would pace energetically around the bedroom, talking for hours, skidding between joviality, wonder and menace until she became exhausted. Every time she tried to fall asleep he woke her up to share some joke or impart some new thought. Once he clutched his head in despair saying: ‘No-one can move fast enough. What’s wrong with everybody? No-one can keep up with me. The whole fucking world is asleep. And I’m flying.’

  In the mornings, after one of these episodes, her eyes felt dry in their sockets. She felt empty. Weightless. Exhausted. A shell of herself.

  But sometimes the position was reversed, and Ella found herself looking at him while he was asleep, his head against the pillow, and she would hold her breath as if she were in the presence of a rare wild beast that was unaware of her being there.

  Chapter Thirty

  The robberies Donny executed were simple, bold and conducted without force, guns or masks. As the police acknowledged, they were daring. The first one was in New Bond Street. Blue diamonds were the target. With hindsight the shop-assistant in the carpet-muffled precincts of the well-known jeweller’s shop should have guessed that the hand reaching out to examine the precious gems was not the soft-skinned one of a wealthy man. There was grime in the crevices of the knuckles and one or two livid triangular notches in the fingers. But sales assistants in Bond Street jewellers are trained in deference and understand that the rich come in many guises. This customer had taken three of the most expensive blue diamonds from the tray to inspect them in the light from the window by the door.

  Donny learned something interesting about himself on that occasion. The minute the gems were in his hand, he had become paralysed, frozen to the spot as he stood facing the assistant in front of those cabinets full of glittering jewellery displays. Time stretched endlessly around him but h
is legs did not respond to the brain’s instructions. It was as if he himself were entirely encased in finely-blown transparent glass and unable to move. He could feel his heart thumping. Then he spoke.

  ‘Thank you very much. I’ll be keeping these.’

  It was speech that released him. Words were the hammer which smashed the glass and allowed him to step out as if he had been miraculously unfrozen and released from an ice prison. He ran out of the shop clutching thirty thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds in his fist.

  Around the corner, Sil waited in the getaway car, his trademark cigarette drooping from his lips. The engine was idling when Donny flung open the door of the passenger seat and threw himself in.

  ‘Move. Move!’

  The car pulled out into the West End traffic.

  ‘What do you think of my disguise?’ said Sil.

  Donny, still out of breath, turned and looked at Sil.

  ‘What fucking disguise?’

  Sil took one hand off the steering-wheel and pointed to his head. He was wearing a Jewish skull cap and smiling complacently.

  ‘Orthodox Jews don’t do robberies,’ he said.

  Donny let out a yelp of laughter. Both men began to shake with mirth. Soon tears were streaming out of their eyes. Sil glanced at his young friend. There was a vividness about him. Thousands of pounds’ worth of diamonds were clutched in his hand. The skin of his face was clear and glowing with excitement. He looked young and alive, as if he had just been reborn.

  Donny tossed back his gleaming chestnut hair and let out a roar of laughter.

  *

  The first Ella knew about it was when she was woken early in the morning three weeks later. She sat up as Donny came into the bedroom. In the dark, he was pacing back and forth. She switched on the bedside light and Donny began to fling handfuls of fifty pound notes into the air until the room was a blizzard of notes.

  ‘That can’t be your wages,’ said Ella in alarm.

  ‘Oh can’t it?’ he said.

  He opened the bag fully and pitched more notes into the air. There was an expression of grim satisfaction on his face as he told her about the diamonds. They had had to wait three weeks for the stuff to be fenced in Germany. He tipped the bag upside down over his head, until for a moment he resembled the bride at a Greek wedding. Then he threw the bag into a corner and collapsed diagonally on his back across the bed. Within minutes he was asleep. Could there ever have been a more dangerous smile on the lips of a radiant hoodlum? He too looked like a dancer, sprawled there, arms flung back, one leg bent at the crook of the knee. Ella got out of bed and examined the scattered fifty and twenty pound notes. When she tried to get back into the bed she found he had left her no space to get in. For the rest of the night she lay curled up in a foetal crouch in a corner of the bed amid the leaf-fall of ten thousand pounds’ worth of notes. In the morning, Donny got up to go to work as usual.

  ‘I don’t want you doing this any more,’ Ella announced in a huff.

  He grabbed a few notes, stuffed them in his pocket and swallowed the last of his tea.

  ‘Suit yourself. Tell Mark to come up and take the money. It’s for him.’

  After he had gone Ella snatched up two hundred pounds or so for herself and sorted the rest into piles. She knocked on Mark’s door. Mark mumbled something from the other side. He had a girl with him. She called through and told him that his money was waiting upstairs.

  Then Ella made her way to the shops in the West End and bought a brown velvet-trimmed winter coat with a fur collar from Fenwick’s. After that she walked down to Freed’s in St Martin’s Lane and bought three new pairs of ballet shoes, four soft primrose silk leotards and some expensive pale yellow tights. She walked past Leicester Square, up Regent Street and into Oxford Street. In Selfridges she looked for a wedding-dress. She tried on several in the wedding department of the main store but they were too ornate, so she went to Miss Selfridge and bought a white lace minidress and a wide-brimmed white felt summer hat with a border of flowers.

  *

  A week later Ella looked out of the window and her stomach churned. A police car was crawling slowly along in the street below. It stopped a few houses away. Ella was seized with fear.

  ‘Donny. Donny. Quick. Look. It’s the police.’

  They snatched some clothes, ran downstairs and climbed out of a back window into the unkempt garden. The light was fading fast. They had left the lights on in their own flat upstairs. The rest of the house was in darkness.

  ‘We’ll go to my mum’s.’ She was breathless as they ran through the back streets to the tube station. The shock of bolting gradually receded. They stopped running and walked. By the time they reached Victoria station it was nine o’clock at night. Donny said, ‘Aw fuck it. Let’s go home.’

  When they returned there was no sign of a police car.

  *

  The younger dancers in the company were rehearsing a showcase and Ella was cast as the Herald of Spring in the ballet of Hiawatha. As the weeks passed her anxieties over the robbery abated. She devoted herself fully to dance. The new ballet outfits raised her spirits. The other girls envied the expensive pale yellow silk tights and soft mimosa yellow vests that contrasted so strikingly with the shining blackness of her hair and elvish eyes. It was difficult for people to take their eyes off her when she danced. The seventy-year-old choreographer, whose stiff mask of a face could have been carved from a totem pole, stood with the director of the company watching her as she worked.

  ‘Needs to work on the placing of her arms. She has real joie de vivre though,’ he whispered to the director, who nodded agreement. Ella danced as though she had escaped from the weight of the earth. When she arched backwards she was as pliable as a sapling. Her partner, a pompous boy with over-muscled calves who wore his hair in a pageboy bob, supported her. His warm sweaty hands gripped her waist in preparation for the lift.

  ‘We must do something about that awful boy,’ whispered the choreographer.

  On stage Ella had an understanding of the space surrounding her. She enjoyed creating her three-dimensional shapes in relation to it. Friction, spin and gravity; energy, mass and light; the embodiment of the geometrics of crystal structures brought to life.

  ‘You’re so good I could kill you. How do you do it?’ Manuela, who shared Ella’s dressing room, teased her with mock envy. Ella liked Manuela. They had been at ballet school together. Manuela’s soft eyes suggested something biddable about her. Her shoulders were rounded, her mouth often slightly open, and she was sometimes told off for slouching at the barre. When she danced there was something casual and slapdash about her movements. Manuela had already changed into her day-clothes and was hanging her costume up next to the row of swan headdresses with their black frowns. She came over to kiss Ella goodbye. Ella smiled and leaned her face into Manuela’s soft breast: ‘Bye, Manuela.’

  Without warning the two girls exchanged a passionate kiss.

  ‘Oh wow.’ Manuela rolled her eyes and crammed her hat on her head. ‘Better get back to my boyfriend.’

  ‘Me too,’ laughed Ella.

  All the dancers appreciated the individual and secret beauty of each other’s bodies. It bound them together in some way.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Hetty perched on the sofa looking radiant. Her gold curls were cut short and she wore a grey suit with a diamante bluebird brooch on the lapel.

  ‘Oh how hilarious. Donny should learn to behave himself.’ Hetty gave a chuckle. ‘Sometimes I wonder if Donny is capable of killing someone.’

  Ella was wearing a loose top, black tights and stripy leg-warmers. She jutted her chair back on two legs. Hetty sipped her tea and looked around the sitting-room.

  ‘You should get a carpet for this flat, honey. There’s a roll of blue carpet in the house in Muswell Hill I could give you. No-one’s going to notice it’s gone. You might as well have it.’ Hetty sounded practical and well-grounded as usual. She continued with a voluble stream of talk.<
br />
  ‘Well. My news. I have this new beau. He’s a real sweetie and he has a title. I managed to pry him away from his girlfriend who was in a terrible state and not doing him any good at all. A total addict.’ Hetty rolled her eyes. ‘Incoherent. Clearly coked to the eyeballs all day. I told him she would destroy him. He’s so grateful to me now. Did I ever tell you that I have some sort of British aristocrat ancestor? Sir Tony Hardwicke.’ On the spur of the moment, Hetty dipped her ladle into a soup of false ancestry. ‘He was a relative of the Dukes of Cumberland or something. He was probably deported to the States for something vile.’ Hetty chuckled again. ‘We never really knew much about him.’ She pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Her eyes shone with a strange mixture of earthiness and disembodiment. She took a deep breath and sighed.

  ‘You’re lucky that you’re going to be married. I’d love to be married. I wouldn’t care what he’d done. Do you have cookies or coffee or anything?’ They went into the kitchen. Hetty wandered around picking up and examining some of the blue-and-white-striped crockery.

  ‘You know that old broderie anglaise Victorian nightie your mother gave you? The one that belonged to your grandmother. There it is hanging over the back of that chair. Do you think I could borrow it? He’s invited me to somewhere called Chatsworth for the weekend in a month’s time. It belongs to the Duke of something or other. Devonshire, I think. The Rolling Stones are going to be there and loads of hoorays. That nightie is so cute. It looks like an heirloom or something. I could use it.’

  ‘That nightie can be quite cold. I wore something cotton and caught a chill the other day.’