Fifty-Minute Hour

by Wendy Perriam

  I use Waitrose for my exercise. It’s cheaper than a gym and less solitary than jogging. I trot up and down each aisle a dozen times each weekday, and twenty on a Saturday; sometimes with my trolley, sometimes not. Young men often follow. I never feel attractive, but people say I am. I think it’s just my hair, which is very thick and heavy and reaches well below my waist. I’ve never cut it in my life. John-Paul says I keep it long to establish my identity as female. I began life as a male. For my whole nine months in the womb, both my parents assumed I was a boy. And even after the birth my father was still boasting about his ‘son’. He stopped boasting when he saw me. I was large and bald and ugly and quite obviously castrated. I try to quash the memory, which is upsetting in a supermarket, especially on a Saturday when everyone’s in families – fathers pushing trolleys, fathers holding daughters whom they might even have wanted, young couples arm in arm. I gave up all my boyfriends when I started with John-Paul. It seemed unfaithful, somehow, and they didn’t like it, anyway, when I called them by his name. My brain just plays the record, needle in the groove: John-Paul, John-Paul, John-Paul, John-Paul, John-Paul.

  I dial his number as soon as I get back, leave another message from another (meeker) Mary, ape her simpering voice. I check the clock, a tiny ugly plastic one which came free with a computer and was a present from a client. I’ve done quite well: Monday’s session’s nearer by one hundred and seven minutes. I suppose I ought to eat, though it’s not easy on my own. I drag upstairs to Sasha, hand her over the package (brains and sweetbreads), ask her very casually if she’d like to come to lunch. I know the answer before she spits it out. Sometimes I ask strangers, odd people in the street. ‘Come and share my lunch’ – or tea or dinner. The answer’s always no. It reminds me of that story in the Gospels, when the guests declined the wedding feast. My parents weren’t religious. I had to read the Bible like other adolescents read porn, or violent comics – under covers in the dark. I still remember that chilling phrase in Matthew: ‘Many are called, but few are chosen’; imagine John-Paul saying it in his jam-and-granite voice.

  I climb another storey to invite the man in number three. We all have numbers on our doors, which gives us more identity, except mine is zero and therefore blanks me out. No reply from Three. Four is fasting, Five works nights, sleeps days. I trail all the way downstairs again and pour boiling water on to basil-flavoured noodles. I had a friend called basil once – yes, lower case. He always signed his name without the capital. I could phone him, I suppose, ferret out his number from my five-years-old address book, ask him if he’s free, but he’d probably only refuse, like all the rest.

  The noodles mulch and soften, slip down very easily. I can’t taste basil, can’t taste anything. I drink water from a cup, which is a completely different sensation from water in a glass, and makes it more like milk. I’ve bought a piece of cheesecake for dessert. I like the name – my two favourite foods combined, yet tasting unlike either. I sometimes dream of cheesecakes – those heavy soggy foreign ones with moisture-logged sultanas which sink down near the crust. I never tell John-Paul. He prefers Wilhelm’s dreams to food ones, and, anyway, I’ve given most foods up. Eating’s so one-sided.

  The food never loves you back. It’s like John-Paul again – passion unreciprocated. Even now, I’m sinking teeth in curd, tonguing up cream and cherry topping, and the cake itself just sits there getting smaller. No emotion, no response, basil was like that in bed – passive, uninvolved, and always dwindling.

  There’s no washing-up, except two teaspoons and the cup. I ate the noodles from their pot, the cheesecake from its carton. All the same, I run a bowl of water, froth up Fairy Liquid. Rituals are important, help to pass the time. Three thousand and seven minutes now. I wish it were two thousand. The three thousands are quite frightening, especially on my own.

  I pass the afternoon rearranging my collections. I collect anything that’s small and doesn’t die. I like to keep the different piles neat and clearly labelled. At five-thirty Howard rings and we do it with the light on. My bedsit’s always gloomy, even in high summer. Howard’s not a boyfriend. He helps me pay the bills. Which means mainly John-Paul’s bills. John-Paul writes them out himself on stiff white damask paper (old-fashioned, like his shirts), and times them to arrive on the first of every month. I don’t know how he does it. I find the post erratic and have sometimes missed a birthday by as much as half a week, but maybe John-Paul has a patient who’s Someone in the Post Office.

  I decide on early bed. If I swallow enough pills, I can sleep for thirteen hours, which is nearly eight hundred minutes off my load. I hate sleeping on my own, though my divan bed is so narrow, there’s not much room for partners. My clients are all small. I never take John-Paul to bed – not now. The once I did, I woke with bleeding hands. He was made of glass underneath his clothes and when I tried to fondle him he shattered into pieces, and I scarred my fingers badly. On my bed is safer than inside it. Sometimes he’s my father, watching by the womb, praying for a girl. Sometimes he’s the chaplain in a hospice, helping me to die. Chaplains can hold hands. Their rules are very different. I checked it with St Christopher’s, where people die quite regularly anchored to a chaplain.

  I die at least five times, lingeringly but bravely. No morphine, no self-pity. The final time is real, if sleep is death.

  Adieu.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Make sure you take your raincoat, Bryan.’

  I’ve got it.’

  ‘And those shoes won’t like the rain.’

  ‘I’ll change them.’

  ‘Do you have to leave so early?’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘You never used to, did you, dear? Other firms don’t start at seven o’ clock.’

  ‘It’s the management consultants. They want more productivity.’

  ‘Don’t the other staff object?’

  ‘Not really. Just the older ones. Must dash. I’ll miss the train.’

  ‘Don’t I get my kiss?’

  He moved a step towards her, let his lips graze empty air. He didn’t like her smell: powder over sweat, hot flesh in cold silk knickers. Peck and gone. He heard her calling after him until he turned the corner – alarm clock for the neighbours. ‘I put fish paste in your sandwiches. I need the cheese for supper. Don’t be late. Macaroni spoils.’

  At least the train was empty. He’d caught the eight-thirteen for seven years; other people’s newspapers thrust across his own, other people’s briefcases slammed down on his feet. The six-ten was his exclusively. If he’d had the voice, he could have sung. No one to report him, and he was feeling almost well. Monday was a good day – well, better than the rest, since there were still another four to go before he spent another weekend with his Mother. Weekends took their toll.

  He opened his blue notebook, still hadn’t dared the red one. He’d touched it in the shop, returned a dozen times, nervous fingers stroking down its shiny crimson cover. No lines inside at all, just blank and dangerous paper, with no limits, no restraints. His blue book had ruled margins as well as neat ruled lines, and was labelled ‘narrow feint’, which sounded like a description of himself. He was narrow top and bottom, longed to have broad shoulders, be less what he called an ‘-ish’ man: smallish, fairish, slimmish, youngish, with mousish hair and lightish hazel eyes.

  ‘GOLD STARS’, he wrote, in his neatish faintish writing, drew a line beneath it with his pen. He couldn’t think of many stars at all. He’d bought a coloured shirt, but hadn’t dared to wear it. He’d stood up to his Mother on the matter of the mushrooms, but spent all next day apologising. He’d plucked up courage to say hallo to Avril in the office, but his voice came out so softish, she hadn’t even noticed, let alone replied.

  ‘BLACK MARKS’, he wrote, but didn’t underline it, just covered two whole pages, and was still writing very swiftly when he arrived at Fenchurch Street. Thank God he lived in Upminster, rather than Ponders End or Cheshunt, which would mean arriving at King’s Cross. Peop
le said the bodies were still down there – bits of bodies, charred and twisted limbs.

  He’d started a Disaster Scrapbook since 1987. Zeebrugge, then Hungerford, the Enniskillen massacre, the King’s Cross fire just ten days later. His Mother believed in an English God who punished Jews and foreigners. But these were God’s own people, normal decent British, shopping in a Berkshire town, or stocking up on duty-free on the Coffin of Free Enterprise. Or commuters like himself, merely earning livings, travelling up and down towards their pensions. And even the weather had been weird and overwrought that year – the coldest January since 1940, the wildest storm since 1703. Statistics helped a little. Fifteen million trees destroyed seemed somehow much more bearable than his one ripped-up Cox’s Pippin.

  But the horrors had continued – through ’88 and ’89, and into 1990: Lockerbie and Hillsborough, the Clapham Junction train smash, the British Midland air crash, the Marchioness disaster, kidnappings and hijacks, fatal gas explosions, avalanches, mud-slides, constant rapes and muggings. And then the ozone layer. He’d forgotten the statistics, but the hole was getting bigger all the time. He’d thrown away his aerosols, never bought anything in polystyrene cartons, but other people did, despite the scares and warnings – irresponsible people who still lit up in tube trains despite the ban on smoking, or bought guns without a licence, or made love without a Durex. He’d never made love, ever, not in thirty-one long years. Nobody had asked him, and he’d probably never get a Durex to stay on. He’d watched a commercial on TV where they gave a demonstration, using a banana. Bananas weren’t quite fair. Who’d ever seen a limp one?

  He checked his watch, relieved he’d bought a digital. It made time more precise. He could see the tiny figure two changing into three. 6.33. Exactly. He walked swiftly down the escalator, which not only saved more minutes, but prevented him from lingering on the underwear advertisements, especially the graffitied ones which turned women into men, jumbled all his boundaries. He found underwear upsetting, even on a man.

  The station smelt of heat and urine, overlaid with damp. Last night’s litter huddled into corners, or clung round grimy bench legs, as if desperate for shelter or support. There was no one else around, save one old dosser sleeping on his coat, a disaster in himself. Bryan walked the other way, towards the black hole of the tunnel, heard angry muffled roarings, glimpsed sudden sparks and flashes, but no actual solid train. Not the time for suicide. You could decide to jump and wait so long you’d change your mind again. Decisions weren’t his forte. He could write out ‘PROS’ and ‘CONS’, underline them both, divide the page right down the middle with a thick-ruled vertical line, so that nothing overlapped, and still be left completely paralysed. He imagined a decision would look like a banana, if he ever got that close to one to check. Something firm and solid, which stood up on its own; something healthy and exotic, yet commonplace for some.

  A train roared in, at last. He moved closer to the edge, was tempted just to jump, forget decisions, pros and cons, simply act, for once, become part of all that speed and force, spend his next life welded to a tube train. Too late. The doors were opening and he stepped in, still alive. No one in the carriage.

  ‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘Just practising.’ Nice to speak to someone; ask the time, even though he knew it; comment on the weather, as people had when he’d lived much further out. It wasn’t safe to speak in London. A guard might be a gunman, a tramp a terrorist. A girl had asked his name once, a total stranger on the eighteen-twenty-two.

  ‘Bryan,’ he’d told her. ‘Bryan Payne.’

  ‘Pain?’ she’d said, half-mocking. He’d known she wouldn’t like it. People never did.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Pain like hurting?’

  ‘No. Payne with y, n, e.’

  ‘Those funeral directors are called Payne.’

  ‘Yes.’ He knew, resented it. ‘It’s a different spelling, though.’ End of conversation. Women never lasted. One was getting in now, thighs straining through her flimsy scarlet skirt. Open provocation – that flesh, that curvy red. He put away his notebook, didn’t want her snooping, reading his black marks. She was sitting far too close to him, which seemed suspicious, anyway, with all those empty seats. He sat on both his hands, prayed she’d get out first. The fear was building, building; always did as the time moved close to seven. He couldn’t even run through what he’d say. You weren’t allowed to practise, had to be spontaneous, which was often even harder than decisions. ‘Free association’, it was called – which meant you said what sprang into your mind, without censorship or straining. John-Paul had told him once that Freud’s own phrase – freier Einfall – was far better than its inexact translation. He didn’t speak German, spoke no languages at all except Mother-soothe and English and a phrase or two of Welsh, but he suspected that word ‘Einfall.’ It contained the idea of ‘eruption’, John-Paul had pointed out, those sudden extemporaneous thoughts which burst into your head.

  ‘Eruption’ sounded frightening. There were enough eruptions in the universe, things exploding, breaking up. And he’d spent years and years fighting to suppress all personal eruptions, physical as well as simply verbal. Belches, farts, or rumblings were all abhorrent to his Mother. His body was so quiet now, it might as well be dead. It was John-Paul who made the noises – suckings, shiftings, sudden flares of matches, long deep exhalations, hoarse unhealthy coughs. He worried sometimes that he’d die of cancer from all that passive smoking: hours and hours each month inhaling John-Paul’s Chesterfields.

  The sessions always ended with his Mother, where they invariably began. He saw it as a Circle Line – no progress, endless loops. Even his dreams hardly varied in their content. He was always wrapping up his Mother in a parcel, sending her off to Benares or Peking. Before he woke, the parcel thudded back again, landed on his doormat, marked ‘Return to Sender’, and often half-undone. He’d tried changing the addresses, chosen far-flung islands with corrupt or useless postal systems which wouldn’t send things back. Except they always did, even tiny foolish islands such as Ponape or Tuitula, which he hadn’t known existed until he found them on the map. John-Paul said they couldn’t stop the sessions until the parcel was delivered as addressed. It was costing him a fortune, in stamps, in John-Paul’s bills.

  He’d been going four whole years now, four years of so-called therapy, which had made him worse, not better; adding new oppressive guilts about the bills – alarming, never-ending bills which got higher every year and which meant giving up all luxuries, even cutting back on basics. He didn’t mind the privations for himself – no holidays, no clothes, no car, no treats or trips or outings, but his Mother had the same restraints without the actual bonus of John-Paul. Could he call it ‘bonus’ – the shameful sodden Kleenex, his amputated mornings, the need for endless lies?

  ‘Why are things so tight, dear? I thought you’d had a rise?’

  ‘No. They … changed their minds.’

  He invented crises, pay cuts, money lost in corporate frauds, his wallet stolen – yes, again – impending mergers, friends who borrowed money and then fled. Or he told her he was saving – saving for her funeral, so he could do things with some style; saving for a Ford Granada to drive her down to Eastbourne at weekends. Weekends he made his lists, in his other bigger notebook, which had an index at the back and a page in front headed ‘Personal/Financial’, nicely ruled and subdivided into Business, Bank, Medical and Accident, Insurance, Car and Notes. A shame about the car – all those unfilled spaces – its registration number, his driving licence number, his car insurance number, his AA/ RAC number. But he’d filled in all the rest, reread it each weekend to make sure he hadn’t changed: his name, address and telephone number; his national insurance number, the name of his GP, his next of kin, his blood group. ‘In case of accident, please notify …’ He’d left that blank, deliberately, didn’t want his Mother poking his remains, criticising the way he’d been run over, telling him he should have done it her way, or at least warned her in ad
vance. Meals didn’t cook themselves and she could have saved the time, not wasted best rump steak.

  Not that they ate steak – not now – not since the last increase in John-Paul’s hefty fees. (He upped the fee each January – the worst time of the year, when everybody’s finances were already wrecked by Christmas.) He couldn’t eat much anyway, with the constant pain, the heartburn. He avoided his GP, feared a diagnosis. He’d seen an ulcer once, on Your Life In Their Hands, writhing in full colour on the lining of a stomach. The television surgeon had pierced it with his scalpel and its red lips seemed to scream.

  The girl got out at the stop before his own. He could see her thighs still gaping on the seat – a different seat – the one right opposite. Her red and writhing lips were opening wider, wider, as he peered up her thin skirt, pierced it with his scalpel. He fought to change the images before he arrived at John-Paul’s rooms. Safer to talk Mothers, over-sixty-fives.

  He stood ready at the doors as the train shuddered to a stop. Seven and a half minutes and he’d be lying on the couch, breaking into fragments. The terror hadn’t lessened, not in four long years. John-Paul was his surgeon, made the diagnoses. ‘You see me as your feared and hated father.’

  He’d never had a father. His Mother’s husband had been unreasonable enough to die before his birth, and without insurance. He’d spent much of his brief childhood trying to draw fathers: pin-men, matchstick men, squiggles with no substance and no eyes. There’d been no males at all – no grandfathers, no uncles, no brothers or best friends. Yet now, his world was full of males – cloned and cut-out males, sharing the vast office, or jostling in the gents, stamped from the same stiff grey polystyrene as the desks, the plants, the chairs. He hated BRB – a twenty-storey tower-block firm with eyes instead of windows, swivelling up and down the whole of Greater London, tracking workers’ movements. Their spies were everywhere, pretending to be traffic wardens, or guards on trains, or tourists. He could see one now – Fletcher from Accounts, doubling as the ticket collector, the man who worked the lift. The lifts were automatic, and anyway he wasn’t due at work yet. Two hours to go – free time. Except time was never free, always tied to Mother, Mother or John-Paul.