Fifty-Minute Hour

by Wendy Perriam

  He shuffled in his unlaced shoes back towards the bed, sat down on the edge of it, cradling his poor snake. Not ‘poor’, for heaven’s sake. Anne was extremely fortunate in having neither feet nor shoes. He checked his watch. It was getting very late. His Mother would be rising any moment, putting on the kettle, calling him to eat his Coco Pops. He could see himself taking his first mouthful, his own small scrunch completely lost in the Last Crunch of the universe as it came crashing down around them in the kitchen. Five billion years wasn’t all that long. Just a few quite small decisions could take half that time on bad days. If the sun was going to shrivel, then shouldn’t he be worrying, making some contingency plan, maybe increasing his insurance? There wasn’t much time left.

  ‘Left’. He started, frowned in concentration. Hadn’t he just briefed himself by thinking of the word? Three times that word had come to him like a signal or a pointer. He’d better stop his dithering and follow where it led. His fingers made sweet contact with the lace of his left shoe, then fumbled to a standstill. If he was going to go by words, then ‘right’ had all the edge; meant ‘correct’ and ‘fitting’, ‘proper’, even ‘orderly’, in the sense of putting things to rights. He slid his right foot forward, stared at it unseeingly. His thoughts were higher up. He’d just read in that Digest that the left side of the brain was meant to be superior, so maybe he was wrong about the right.

  ‘Right, wrong, right, wrong, right, wrong!’ He could hear that sergeant’s voice – furious, contemptuous, as he drilled them faster, faster, up and down the asphalt in the sticky mocking sun. ‘You don’t know right from wrong, Payne. It’s probably in the family. Did your mother know your father?’

  He sank down on the bed again, kicked both his shoes off violently, heard his Mother’s warning cough as they crashed against the wall. Had she known his Father – ever, once, at all? He wormed beneath the covers, still in suit and socks, slumped face down on the pillow and wept into his snake.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Must stop, must stop. Things to do – lunch to cook, shirts to wash, typing to return to Emma Barnes. Oh, Blessed Edwin Mumford, help me and forgive me – I can’t stop, just can’t stop. A hundred and eight. Oh, wonderful! It’s out of this world. If only I’d started earlier, years ago, decades ago, I’d have reached the million mark by now. A hundred and nine. Terrific! That’s enough, that’s it. I really must switch off now, go down and light the oven. Phyllis coming round for lunch, to discuss the church bazaar – mustn’t find me naked on my bed. Fricassee of veal and apple pie. I’ve made the pie already, and the veal won’t take that long. Okay, just one more small one, before I braise the meat; one teeny tiny one. A hundred and … No, take it nice and slowly, really spin it out this time if it’s going to be the last. Why small, in any case? Why not a quite colossal one, a naughty big outrageous one? A hundred and what? Lost count now. Who cares about the count? Harder, faster, harder – turn it to top speed. Two million and … Oh, God! It’s broken – broken.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Drawers go in and out, Bryan, so any drawer can be seen, of course, as phallic, but in this particular case, it would appear to me that the salad-drawer represents your mother’s genitals. The serpent is your father’s threatening phallus, coiled inside your mother’s “box” or hole – a fertile place, as depicted by the salads. You dare not go in there yourself, or you may be bitten by a snake.’

  Bryan reached out for his own snake, traced the outline of its mouth, the contours of its lumpy red felt tongue. He was glad it had no teeth, not even woolly ones. He murmured something indistinct and anodyne, tried to blank out the statistics he’d just read on passive smoking. John-Paul was on his fourth already.

  ‘The whole dream seems to me to reveal an obvious obsession with genitals – or what could be described as a “displacement outwards” from genitals to knickers.’ John-Paul tapped his cigarette, removed a phallic worm of ash. ‘I’ve already mentioned the meaning of drawers as undergarments – an old-fashioned word, but nonetheless emotive – and the “knickerbocker glory” re-emphasises this. Once again, your father seeks the glory in the knickers, though he seems injured by his attempt this time, which I suggest is a manifestation of your own castration fears …’

  ‘No,’ said Bryan, to no one. No one heard.

  ‘It could also be Oedipal, of course: your wish to harm your hated father, as a rival to your mother’s favours – the one who is allowed inside her drawers or knickers, whereas you yourself are banned.’

  ‘I didn’t hate my Father,’ Bryan objected.

  ‘I beg your pardon? You’re speaking extremely indistinctly. I wonder if that indicates some reluctance to participate, perhaps reluctance to be here at all, today?’

  ‘Yes,’ mouthed Bryan, to Anne. ‘No,’ he said, much louder.

  ‘It’s just that I think I’d like to talk about the class now. I should have told you earlier, but I … I went back just last Friday and my Father was quite badly injured.’ He took a deep breath in, inhaling John-Paul’s smoke, eyes watering and smarting. ‘And,’ he added, voice a keening wail, both hands clutching Anne, as if for comfort, ‘Mary’s died of cancer.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  I’m swamped in black and brown, swirling lines crisscrossing in my head, whorls of sticky still-wet paint churning in my stomach and my bowel. It’s difficult to breathe. Someone’s slapped gouache right across my face, dammed up my nose and mouth. There’s no air in the room. The pictures need it all. I can hear them panting in and out, breathing far too fast. They’re all squashed and jammed together – some not even hung, but stacked around the skirting, balanced across chairs. ‘I’m sorry,’ I keep telling them. ‘I need a bigger place, but …’

  I didn’t buy the sculptures. There wasn’t room – or cash. I can’t take any more clients, not with pictures on the bed. I’m too tired, in any case, too raw and sore and smarting, all my different orifices screaming out in pain. I can’t really blame the blokes. They paid for what they got, didn’t overstay their time; were mostly lonely misfits, not sadistic dangerous maniacs. One even said he loved me, bought me twelve red roses. The thorns were bigger than the blooms, which died within the day.

  I weave around the room, avoiding pictures, furniture. I’ve got to get more cash. I haven’t seen John-Paul for three weeks, two days and fifty-seven minutes. I kept praying that he’d ring. Even with my clients there, I was listening for the phone, all psyched up to answer it, naked, wet or shagged. I rarely left the bedsit, so I wouldn’t miss his call, even contacted British Telecom to check the phone was working. Surely he was worried, wondering where I was? After seven endless days, he wrote me two brief lines, enquiring – curtly – was I ill, since I’d stopped attending sessions? I responded with two words: ‘No, fine’ – scrawled in blood-red biro on a huge white sheet of paper. Last week he wrote again: if I wasn’t indisposed, then my absence could suggest that I’d found the last few sessions quite disturbing, and that itself seemed an obvious indication against any thought of termination at this stage. It hurt, that letter, actually – its chilly tone, its coldly formal phrases – especially ‘termination’, which is the word they use for pregnancies, and a euphemism for murder. Oh, I know he said I shouldn’t even think of it, but the fact he used the word at all must mean it’s on his mind; means he probably hopes I’ll terminate, while urging that I shouldn’t. There’s a word for that as well – a jargon word: projection. He’s guilty of the very things he accuses all us patients of – reversal and denial.

  He even sent his bill, enclosed it with the letter, charged me for missed sessions when I was bleeding here at home. I was dying on account of him and all he was concerned about was whether he’d be paid. I was so upset I decided that I’d gratify him: do what he was angling for and quit therapy for ever; not stay where I’m unwelcome and resented. I kept repeating that word ‘terminate’, like a sort of evil mantra. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll terminate, if that’s what you’re suggesting. Do mur
der me – feel free.’ I even considered changing my whole lifestyle, leaving London and moving back to Shropshire; digging up the corpse of my old home, unearthing my dead parents, my dead and rotting childhood; living as a ghost there. I tried to pack a suitcase, check rooms to rent, and train times, but I felt too ill to travel, too weak to deal with house agents; just flaked out on the sofa and lay there several days, shivering and feverish and hardly knowing where I was. Yet John-Paul assumes I’m ‘fine’; accepted my scrawled note – the most flagrant lie I’ve ever told, and he took it at face value.

  ‘Fine,’ I say, repeating it, as I light a cigarette. ‘I’m absolutely fine.’ People hate it if you’re ill. Sympathy’s like money – you need it for yourself. I’d better call on Wilhelm, suggest a new arrangement: not fellatio for dreams, but fellatio for cash. Dreams are quite superfluous if I’m not going to John-Paul, and my own are more dramatic now, in any case. Last night I dreamed John-Paul was a monster who lived in the Dead Sea, and had sucked me in as food, along with weeds and snails and debris and tiny writhing eels. I was living in his stomach which was lined with scarlet snot; swimming round and round it, battening off his food supply, excreting through his bowel.

  I fetch my coat and handbag, lock my door so the pictures can’t get out, climb the steep iron stairs to street-level. It’s dark outside – dark at four p.m. The year is dying with me: brief days, bleak nights, decay and damp heavy on the streets. Though winter in the country is always more oppressive than winter in the town. I keep thinking back to Shropshire, where all life seems suspended by the last week of November – the sun a pallid blur in a waste of homeless cloud; sap falling, leaves abandoned, bracken beaten flat; no green except the ivy strangling dying stone. How quiet it must be there now, with all life folding down, all helpless creatures hibernating – toads shrouded under tree roots in their coffins of dead leaves; bats huddled in old churches, wings folded round their bodies like thin black ragged duvets.

  London shrugs off winter. Red buses pant and sweat, and traffic noise masks the sound of death-knells. There are no leaves, here to fall, just shrill-green plastic Christmas trees sprouting in small sweet-shops, wreaths of ersatz holly. ‘Only twenty-four shopping days till Christmas. Order your turkey NOW!’ Only a million billion shopping days till I pluck and truss John-Paul. I stop a moment, fight to get my breath. It’s not good for me to think of him, especially not outside. I might faint, or fall, or get those crimson pains again, the ones I had all yesterday.

  The butcher’s isn’t crowded, but I still dither for ten minutes before I dare to enter. I haven’t eaten for two days, so my stomach starts objecting to those palely naked chickens with their puckered goose-fleshed skin, those pink and hairless rabbits lanced on metal hooks, those blood-smeared surgeons’ overalls. The back room’s always worse, of course – furred but eyeless calves’ heads watching while I kneel, mounds of shining ox livers seeping blood into the sawdust along with Wilhelm’s sperm.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he says. ‘Mein Herzensschatz I make you happy, no?’

  ‘No,’ I say, then, ‘yes’. It’s vital that I please him. I let him dry my eyes on a dirty off-white handkerchief which smells of sausagemeat – the gamey sort, with herbs. Did he dry the eyes of all those Auschwitz victims, before he gouged them out, flung their Jewish giblets in a pail?

  ‘I’m all right now,’ I tell him, still waiting for my payment. I don’t get cash at all, but a huge great flank of beef, ice-cold from the freezer. He bestows it with such triumph, such a sense of liberality, it numbs all my objections, though my landlady’s away, and her own freezer isn’t large enough to hold it anyway. It’s almost too big to carry, and I keep stopping, shivering, as it drips melted ice (and blood) down both my legs. I’m wet through as it is. It’s raining, always raining, though this is different rain spiteful callous winter rain slashing in my face. In fact, it’s hard to see the wolfhounds when they first start following me, though I turn round once or twice to check their stealthy padding. I dismiss them as vague shadows, or just the moaning of the wind, until they actually brush against me with their rough and hairy coats, noses jabbing me at waist-level, tails whipping me both sides. They’re the biggest dogs I’ve ever seen, with deep and powerful chests, long muscly legs, and substantial brawny hindquarters which suggest Olympic power. They’re both slavering at the meat, intense dark eyes focused on the carcass, tongues lolling from their mouths.

  It’s obvious why they’ve come: John-Paul must have sent them to relieve me of my burden – which shows he cares, remembers who I am, isn’t trying to oust me, as I feared. I turn into an alleyway, ease the side of beef onto the ground. They fling themselves upon it, tear it with their fangs, eating with a voraciousness I recognise. If John-Paul were a joint of beef and I a simple dog, I’d fall on him with just that same abandonment, devouring him, consuming him, gulping down every smallest morsel. I’ve never taken Communion (or even attended a Communion service), but I assume that’s how believers must eat God – desperate to ingest Him, get Him down inside them, not let a cell or corpuscle go to waste.

  Once the dogs have finished, licked their lips, licked and sniffed the gutter, hoovered all around for any last remaining blood-trails, they start fawning on me, mobbing me, tails thwacking at my coat, dark moist noses sniffing at my cunt. I’m feeling a lot better just to be appreciated. They’re so warm and so alive, and I’m bonded to John-Paul again by annexing his pets; his cruel letters cancelled now, his wounding words erased. I pick their trailing leads up, turn right instead of left as I leave the narrow alley, take a puddly detour to the recreation ground. I let them bound and gallop past the dark and dripping slides, watch them barking at the shadows, loping through the mud. I climb on to a child’s swing, which feels wet beneath my skirt, swing to and fro, to and fro, thinking of John-Paul. I’m no longer even cross with him. Anger needs great energy and mine’s all leaked away. Or perhaps I really love him and what I classed as fury was something else entirely.

  I wish I were his dog, so I could lick his face and eat his scraps and smell his human smell; brush against his trousers, fetch endless sticks for him. Perhaps I’d be his lap-dog, his pouting poncy Pekinese, so I could lay my fancy head against his waistcoat buttons and have him feed me humbugs. Or his fierce and ravening guard-dog, who’d maul and claw all those rival patients, savage them to bone. Or his loyal and trusty guide-dog, so when he’s groping-old, he’d never dare let go of me, and, joined at last, I could lead him up to God. Or, best of all, his sick dog, so he’d stroke my head, suggest I sleep on his bed rather than my basket, coax my tablets down me with scraps of chicken breast. My pills are all at home. I’d better go and get them, put myself to bed. I’m feeling very strange.

  I call the dogs to heel, wish they wouldn’t pull so hard as I limp and struggle back. Both my hands are reddened as I finally unleash them in my room.

  ‘Down!’ I shout, as the larger darker-coated male bolts towards the door, knocks a picture flat. The slightly smaller female is prowling up and down, restless and suspicious, only stopping for a moment to claw the chair, rip a piece of fabric from its seat. If my room was cramped before, it’s now completely overwhelmed – the pungent smell of crude damp dog choking the scant air; a wild tangle of wet paw-prints patterning the carpet. They keep shaking themselves, so that showers of dirty droplets spray against the pictures, stain my pale cream shirt. The paintings shift and tremble. They’re frightened of the dark, have never liked my bedsit with its mean and grudging light. I need to let them out – not just the dogs – the canvases.

  The male dog springs towards me, starts pawing at my shoulders, almost knocks me over. I fight it off, escape into a corner, try out commands like ‘Sit!’ and ‘Stay!’, but they’re totally ignored. Both of them are barking now, a hoarse and hacking sound, as if their throats are cracked, inflamed. I’m worried other tenants will complain. Pets are not allowed, not even quiet and harmless ones like cats.

  I reach up to the cupboard wh
ere I keep my tranquillisers, make a bread and Valium sandwich, feed half to each dog. They devour it with such passion I can hardly believe they guzzled that huge flank of beef just an hour ago. I’m beginning to feel frightened. How will I keep up with them – their energy, their appetites? They’re killer-dogs, this breed; were used to hunt fierce wolves before the invention of the gun; can still annihilate a deer, or rip a sheep to pieces, even turn on smaller dogs and tear them limb from limb.

  I swallow my own pills, try – and fail – to eat an old half-pizza which has been around a week or so, light a fag instead. I wish all food could be inhaled, not masticated, and came ready-flavoured with tar and nicotine. Four eyes are watching me, dark distrustful wary eyes, tracking every smallest movement of my hand or foot or head. I approach the smaller dog, inching very cautiously towards her, arid holding out my hand for her to sniff. She’s brindled brown and grey, with lighter paws and muzzle, and protruding whiskery eyebrows. ‘Good girl,’ I murmur softly, as I stroke her wiry coat. (Strange how we tell animals they’re ‘good’. No one tells us humans.) She still seems very fidgety, her long tail tense, her body rigid, braced, but I keep stroking very rhythmically, and soon the rhythm and the Valium begin to do their work, and in less than fifteen minutes both dogs are slumped and quiet. I sprawl beside them on the carpet, too tired to clear the chairs or move the pictures from the bed – close my eyes, sink back.