Fifty-Minute Hour

by Wendy Perriam

  An explosive and defiant laugh suddenly rips across the room. I know that laugh – it’s his. He very rarely laughs, in fact, but when he does, it startles. I trace it to its source; find him pawing Cressida, one over-friendly hand exploring the bare flesh between her child-bearing hips and her Page Three Playgirl tits. I turn abruptly on my heel, make for what I assume to be the exit, but it leads into another room – one I haven’t seen – with huge black sculptures in it and crowds more giggly girls, many of them black themselves, as if they’ve been invited here to tone in with the works. I stare in horror at the hunks of painted metal which resemble the remains of all the worst accidents scooped up from the motorways in the last ten years or so, and set down here still wet with blood and gore. Are those John-Paul’s as well? They seem far worse than the paintings. I don’t mean worse artistically, which I suspect would be impossible, but worse in terms of size and sheer solidity, worse in terms of symptoms. If his patients are neurotics, then these are gross psychotics – schizophrenics, psychopaths, raving monomaniacs. How could any mere neurotic dare to take his time, when these awesome locked-ward cases must demand his full attention, must occupy his mind to the exclusion of all else?

  I creep into a corner, try to make myself invisible, which may sound crazy when I’m five foot ten, but actually I’m shrinking all the time. Oh, I’m still the brazen Amazon outside, but inside I’m just an empty husk, shrivelling up to nothing. Seton’s gone; I’ve lost John-Paul – or at least the one I thought I had – and I can rarely keep a man beyond two months. All around me people are in couples or happy chatting groups – relating, laughing, socialising. It’s like a children’s party where all the other lucky kids have been handed out their smiles, but the supply ran out just before my turn. The black girls seem especially wild and whoopy, sparkling with an inner oomph and verve; a powerful bottled tonic whose cork has just flown off, exploding in a shower of bubbly fizz. The noise sounds really threatening, surging up in waves, which seem to break across my head and half-submerge me. I can’t even smoke to calm myself. Seton’s got the cigarettes. That’s a sign of coupledom – one pack between the two of you.

  My hands are out of work. Even an empty cup was something to hold on to, but mine has got mislaid, probably trampled underfoot in all the crush. There’s more wine on the carpet than in anybody’s glass – a dirty threadbare carpet, to match the bare and dirty walls. I can’t bear to think of John-Paul in this setting, or to accept those warped and twisted sculptures as his work. ‘John-Paul,’ I say, as if his name might bring him back. I need him desperately.

  Someone else lolls up to me instead – a tall thin floppy-looking man who appears to have liquorice sticks or sash cords where most of us have bones. ‘Hi!’ he says, smiling, though his smile is sagging too, and his clothes are falling off him – folds of baggy trouser drooping round his hips, and a sweater so voluminous it could hide two football teams.

  ‘D’you smoke?’ I snap, nicotine addiction outlawing good manners. I should at least have parroted his ‘Hi!’

  ‘No, I do not!’ He sounds as if I’ve asked him if he tortures Jews or buggers little boys. He’s probably a member of that boring anti-smoking group which tries to lock up anyone who dares to take a puff. And it never stops with cigarettes – oh, no. They’re all into saving seals, as well, and believe in things like ley lines; would probably stop us breathing if they could get the legislation through, reserve the air for some endangered species. (Actually, we smokers are now the most endangered species on the globe, with smoking bans in cinemas and tube trains, even offices and restaurants – need our own society to protect us from extinction.)

  I sidle a bit closer, tighten my own smile. ‘I suppose you know this show is subsidised by one of the biggest of the tobacco giants – yes, the ones who make Chesterfields, in fact. The artist’s on their board, helps produce their advertising. So if you’re drinking their wine,’ I gesture to his near-empty paper cup, ‘you’re helping swell their profits.’

  He crumples up completely, sags and droops away. Why can’t I meet a macho man who’s come hotfoot from the airport with two hundred king-size duty-free bulging out his sweater? All I get is a floss-haired Mae West-ette, half my height and at least a decade younger, who’s intruding on my corner in little spurts and teeters. She stops to flirt with the largest of the sculptures, caressing all its angles, feeling up its knobs, running teasing fingertips down one long sloping side, as if it’s John-Paul’s naked back. ‘Shit!’ I say out loud.

  ‘Sorry. Did you speak?’ She swings round to check the voice, bestow a gracious smile on it. Another Mary, obviously – the usual misty cornflower eyes and double-cream complexion, and this one’s wearing bows, for heaven’s sake – yes, bows on her cute fringe like a pampered Yorkshire terrier.

  ‘Hi!’ I say. ‘I’m Cressida.’

  ‘Oh, h … hallo, Cwessida.’

  Nervous, too. How sweet. And she can’t quite say her r’s, which is always a sure sign of being super-female. I ape her affectation. ‘You’re a good fwend of the artist, I presume?’

  ‘Er … yes, I am – actually.’

  I love that ‘actually’. So casual, yet just a shade belligerent, as if to warn me not to challenge her position. I do, of course, immediately, spinning her some lurid tale of my own passionate liaison with the artist, then adding a wild threesome and an orgy. She hares off as if I’ve shot her, and I slouch back to the first room, even more depressed now. I don’t like myself at all, or the way I treat the world. I was pretty decent as a kid, as far as I remember; the sort of eager generous child who’d weep for a dead fly, or send all her pocket-money to save lepers or black babies. I had more black babies by the age of twelve or so than most children have toys. I gave my coat away once to some poor thing in my class who only had a jacket and a father doing time. My own father beat me for it, but I think I meant it well.

  I don’t know quite what happened, but I grew up someone else, not the person I should have been – the hopeful happy adult who dared to trust the world, but someone wary, brooding, who upsets other people, someone prickly and aggressive who’s always on her own. The change was very gradual, like a blond kid turning dark, or a winsome little toddler growing big and ugly as a teen. I’m ugly now myself, inside as well as out, feel almost hideous sometimes, a sort of freakish monster normal people shun – yes, even my new lover. Seton’s just ignoring me completely and has glued himself to Cressida (the real one), even managed to persuade her to part with both her baby and her briefcase, so both her hands are free – or would be, if he hadn’t re-engaged them. I can hardly bear to look at him: that oil stain on his jeans which he got when we were kneeling on the deck, making almost-love in the windy rain and dark; those raised and purple bite-marks on his neck. We’re both branded with each other’s marks, which I thought meant we belonged, like people scratching their initials on precious pens or pocketknives.

  ‘Seton!’ I say sharply. He doesn’t hear, doesn’t even turn his head, has totally forgotten that we agreed we’d leave early so we could get back to the boat, incise some wild new marks. It’s an air-sea rescue boat, used in the last war to scoop up drowning airmen from the Channel, and somehow seemed significant in the sense that I was also rescued, winched up from the deep. I suppose he’ll rescue Cressida instead, now; fling her down a lifebelt, haul her into safety, let her recover on his bunk while he gives her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Then, once she’s feeling stronger, he’ll bite her nipples, say she’s got fantastic hair, wind it round his prick, tie her up with it, then kiss and brush it better – all the things he did to me, as if no other girl existed. I know we said no jealousy, no ties, and how we’d each be free to see anyone else we fancied, but saying’s so much easier than doing (which is why therapy fails so often, I suppose). Secretly, I’ve always longed for ties, while pretending to be liberated, footloose – but no one else seemed keen to forge a bond – neither of my parents, and not even Uncle Jack who locked me out last time I t
ried to visit him.

  I begin to feel quite sorry for the baby, who’s been parked on Seton’s coat and is whimpering pathetically, puckering up her face – abandoned, you might say. ‘Join the club,’ I whisper. I could pick her up and rock her, I suppose, but I’m so scared she’s Seton’s kid, I daren’t get that involved, might even cry or something quite disastrous. The girl next to me is laughing, her boozy guffaws tightening like lassos around my neck. I expect she’s got her offspring, too three or four at home, maybe one in utero Seton’s probably sired babies on London’s entire female population – all save me, that is. I’ve never managed to conceive, even when I tried for two whole years – and with anyone and everyone – though they didn’t know, of course. I felt I’d be a better sort of person with a baby to look after, less self-obsessed and reckless. The fact I failed so miserably only goes to prove – again – that I’m just not wholly female. I tend to blame my father. He was so keen for me to be a boy, I guess I did my poor best to oblige him: achieved the height, the size-eight feet, the non-existent womb. (The doctors say I’ve got a womb, but then doctors will say anything to get you out of the surgery, so they can bark ‘Next patient, please.’) Actually, I feel I’ve lost a lot of things – not just my womb and ovaries, but my heart, my sense of hope, that skill which other people have of finding other-halves: saying ‘we’, instead off, spending weekends joined and anchored, not separate, adrift.

  I move off from the baby (and its still smugly nuzzling parents), find another corner, watch the hordes milling round a tray of paper cups, which has suddenly materialised from nowhere, along with some sickly-looking peanuts, dusted with a yellow film which could be jaundice or a curry-flavoured coating. No one’s thinking art – only food or booze or nicotine. I listen to the wisps of conversation which drift in my direction with the smoke – trivia, as usual.

  ‘The third time I threw up was in the Russian Embassy …’

  ‘… such a waste of caviare.’

  ‘No, she only bought the bottom half. The top was …’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t give a damn about my thighs.’

  They no longer seem to form real words, just fractured broken syllables, limping strings of gibberish. ‘Bah-bah-bah-bah-bah I’ve no heart to talk to myself, not even gibberish. Now I’ve seen this wretched show, I can’t continue trying to kid myself that John-Paul’s just a Sunday painter, dashing off a sketch or two, one afternoon a week, with all his prime-time energies still devoted to his patients. His priorities are obvious – art first and last, patients squeezed between. I kept hoping secretly that Seton was exaggerating (and also wrong about his claim that completely untrained people could set up as therapists. He’s absolutely right, alas. I phoned several professional bodies to check he wasn’t lying, and they all concurred: yes, regrettable but true.) I’m still fiercely disappointed not to see my bogus doctor. I spent hours this evening preparing in his honour, trying to out-Mary all the Marys in a baby-blue new dress with a Peter-Pan white collar, which I realise now must make me look grotesque. Actually, the other girls are not dressed up at all – just faded denim, shabby jeans, and two in men’s grey suits and butch black clodhoppers. I suppose they’re all so wildly confident of their looks and femininity, so naturally attractive, they just don’t have to bother with dolling up or clothes. The coloured girls look even more inelegant, as far as gear’s concerned; several in old boiler-suits and three in dungarees. Are they John-Paul’s fans, as well, I wonder, a contrast to the Marys? I suppose he fancies blacks because they’re noted for their passion, their unbridled sensuality.

  I don’t know why I bothered turning up at all. I not only squandered money buying this disaster-dress, I also wasted an hour or more inventing wild scenarios, imagining our meeting in a snazzy Mayfair gallery: how surprised he’d be to see me there – and flattered – how he’d take me on one side and explain that he was giving up his painting; that it demanded too much time, which he’d prefer to devote to patients, especially patients like myself, who were sensitive, discerning. (If we could only meet as equals, I do actually feel quite confident that we’d get on pretty well; share a lot of interests – not art, perhaps, but all those things I used to love before I became a ‘case’: poetry and the countryside, long walks, long thinks, even eating proper meals.)

  ‘On your own?’ a man asks, sidling up towards me with a dentist’s sort of smile – ‘This won’t hurt, I promise.’ He’s not my type at all, looks less like a dentist than a failed and pensioned bank manager in a Burton suit and toecaps (and no hopeful-looking bulges which might suggest a lighter or a pack of Superkings).

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Meet Seton.’ I gesture to the empty air beside me, which scares him off immediately. I’ve got one sharp eye on Seton, as it happens. He’s at the far end of the room now, and mercifully free-standing; no longer joined in an embrace entitled ‘Lovers’ or ‘The Kiss’. I try to keep my cool, not dash up and reclaim him like some unstable frantic wife, but pretend I’m happily absorbed in things artistic. Actually, it’s time I gave the pictures some attention. I’ve only glanced at them quite cursorily so far, and with so much sheer resentment, there was no way I could be fair. I frown in concentration as I study the first three, try to be objective.

  No, I’m really not impressed, and they honestly seem worse than the ones in his consulting room. Those I do admire in some ways, if only for their energy – though of course I’d no idea he’d painted them, which probably makes a quite substantial difference. And I’m also so damn used to them, lying on the couch four times every week, with them writhing all around me – tortured souls not unlike my own. They’ve got a sort of charge: a virulence, ferocity, which you can’t ignore, even if you loathe it. The ones down here are basically the same, in the sense of dark and swirling shapes with no colour and no peace, but without the powerful thrust – looser and less organised, more ‘shitty’ altogether, the paint just smeared around with less control. Seton says he’s never changed his style, but then Seton always disparages him on principle. I’ve still not discovered why he’s so hostile to John-Paul, nor what was their relationship. I suspect it was a dispute about the wife, who was probably Seton’s mistress before John-Paul divorced her. I’ve tended not to push the subject, aware that I’d be doubly hurt if I knew the steamy details – jealous both ways round.

  Actually, if I’m honest with myself, I must confess I’m pretty damn ignorant when it comes to art or sculpture. I can’t really judge these paintings, and if I called them ‘shit’ or ‘lousy’, I suppose it’s more because they make me feel depressed – excluded, somehow threatened. All the same, I continue round the room, scanning every picture, trying not to damn them, even touching each a moment, so I can pick up John-Paul’s vibes. Some Philistine is lolling back against one, leaning on it really hard, as if it’s a back-rest or a bed head. I don’t quite murder him – let’s just say he gets the message. This may not be great art, but it has to be respected.

  I’m back to where I started, the large and black-framed painting called ‘Equinox 16’. (I don’t know why ‘16’, when there are no fifteen other Equinoxes, nor even why Equinox at all. They’re mostly called Untitled 1, 2, 3.) I think I’ve paid due homage now and deserve a small reward. I inch casually, so casually, towards the far end of the room, avoiding couples, Marys; rehearsing what I’ll say to darling Seton (when not swearing at the crowds). No recriminations – just some amusing pert remark about the ambience, or a sensuous little grope to find his Capstans.

  He’s gone. Yes, honestly. And so has Cressida. I crash blindly up the stairs – no one at the top or in the toilet – hurtle down again, search the second room. The bank manager is there still, now talking to Mae West, the Whoopee Goldberg lookalikes, but no Cressida, no Seton, no puckered whimpering child. All the wine I haven’t drunk seems to flood into my head, as if someone’s spliced me to a fifteen-litre wine-box whose tap is pouring straight into my skull. I feel dizzy and disorientated, burning hot, yet shivery. �
�Wimp!’ I tell myself. Why shouldn’t he walk off? I don’t possess him, do I? Possession’s very wrong. Even John-Paul talks disparagingly about my ‘omnipotent’ need to possess him and everyone.

  Omnipotent? I laugh. I’ve no power left at all. Impotent, I’d call it – except that makes me sound a male. I slump against the wall, tug my stupid earrings off. That’s exactly what I am – a not-quite male, a freak with breasts and earrings, but no sex-appeal, no womb.

  I drag back up the stairs again, find my coat, slink out. There’s a taxi cruising past. I flag it down, give it my address – the cellar, not the boat. My country idyll’s over – the herons and the marshes, the huge swollen shining skies rippling upside down in ruffled water, the white herring-gulls leavening brown fields. I expect Seton’s on his way there, switching on the night-sounds just for Cressida – the lap of waves on hull, the mournful scythe of wind through dying grasses, the hooting of a lonely boat winding its slow way towards the sea.

  I force my attention back to dreary Kilburn, start counting my pound coins, alarmed how few they are. I can’t afford taxis, let alone from this far-flung patch of London, which seems a foreign land. I haven’t seen a client in three weeks, so funds are grimly low. But that’s all got to change. I’ll take every client I can get – yes, even the ones I’ve always avoided like the plague – the perverts and the maniacs, those leering casual kerb-crawlers whose pricks are loaded guns. Who cares if I get killed – or AIDS? I know it sounds dramatic or perverse, but I’ve actually tried to catch AIDS: slept with high-risk guys on purpose: bisexuals, drug-injectors. AIDS patients get hugged. I saw it on a TV documentary – nurses sitting up with them all night; heads on laps, kindly arms round shoulders. I suppose I also longed for the attention – not just loving nurses, but high-flown ritzy doctors with professorships and OBEs, and researchers from America, and television cameras focused on my deathbed, and John-Paul really moved this time, maybe moved to tears.