by Deborah Levy
When she stands up she yawns and her blond eyebrows rise up on her forehead and then she quickly puts her hand over her mouth and giggles. There’s a ring on her finger. A thin silver ring with a heart and two baby doves welded onto it. And her nails are clean with shiny see-thru pink stuff painted on them. When my new sister looks at me, I feel I am precious to her.
‘Come on, Bruv. Let’s go inside.’
I’m frightened to go inside and breathe all over the wallpaper.
The man who does the TV weather for the nation finished his forecast tonight by saying, ‘Beware of the chill winds to come.’
Another thing. The ice in my Pepsi jumped out of the glass of its own accord.
I’m sick with longing for the new Cass. She has become airy, like she said she wanted to. For a start, she doesn’t have opinions; she listens to what I have to say as if I am someone important. And when I tell her a joke she laughs, shining her dimples in my direction, making toast with lots of butter, just how I like it. When she eats toast, she breaks it up in the palm of her hand and kind of pecks the crumbs into her mouth, always on the lookout for something I might need. I take more care of how I look these days because I want her to think well of me. She particularly likes my trainers with red lights on the heels, the ones old Cass said made me look like a sad fuck.
‘You’re a style angel,’ this Cass says, and then bends down to wipe off some cereal that’s stuck itself to my shirt. She makes me want to do things for her too. Run her baths, put a new fuse in her hairdryer, walk to the shops and buy her chocolate bars and magazines. I’d cut off my arm if I thought it would please her. But I’m scared too. I’m fucking terrified. What if Cass morphs into her old self? What happened to it anyway? What if old Cass suddenly jumps through the smooth white skin of new Cass, laughing like a demon?
The men around here all make excuses to talk to her when they get back from work. I’ve noticed how they chat from inside their cars, air conditioning on and the windows down. Nothing makes sense any more. Cass leans in towards them, she is all there, light-hearted and smiling, listening to how their day has been and how bored they are with their wives. Some of them give her presents.
Mr Tollington with the wart on his chin from Number Six gave her a tacky gold chain with a creamy pearl on the end – presented to her in a little box lined with red velvet. Cass smiled at him like he was the only man in the world. She even let him put it on for her, his horrible manly fingers lingering on her neck. Worst of all, Mr Lewenstein, who is quite good-looking I suppose (everyone knows he’s got a mistress in Malta), gave her a bracelet plaited from three kinds of gold with a tiny padlock to snap it shut on her wrist. He had the lock engraved with the letter C, ‘personalising it’ he growled from his car window, a flash Jag that he pays me to wash for him on Sundays. Why does she bother talking to these men? I know she knows they’re boring so what does she get out of it? Why does she care whether they like her or not?
‘I told you,’ she says, her voice sort of serious but flirtatious as well, ‘I want to be a pretend woman. The surgeon did well. He really fiddled with my controls.’
She breathes out when she says this, like something amazing has happened to her. Where has the old Cass gone? Did the surgeon slop her into a stainless-steel tray?
I need an Ancient to find me now. We’ve got things to discuss and I know he could help me. He would have answers to where souls go after death and how people transform themselves from one thing to another. He made baskets woven from asparagus stalks and fires from frozen flints. He even knew about the sweat glands of poisonous frogs and which mushrooms were toxic. I want to ask him if he’s scared of the dark and things lurking in the sea like I am, and if he ever had a sister who changed herself like Cass did.
Her blue eyes take me in, and freeze me out.
Placing a Call
You are telling me something I don’t want to hear. You are telling me the honest truth. We are standing in the garden and it is dusk. There are rain clouds in the sky and midges and someone is planting a rose bush in the garden next door. The telephone is ringing.
The telephone is ringing. I run into the house and pick up the receiver. The telephone is pressed against my ear, someone is calling and I am answering. I am saying hello into hard black plastic but I hear the dial tone and the ring tone happening at the same time. Someone is missing. Someone is trying to get through. And then I remember there is a bird in the garden that imitates a telephone when it sings. I can see it now in the tree in the garden where you are telling me the honest truth. It is singing in an old-fashioned ring tone, it is singing like a land line. I run back into the garden.
We are standing in the garden and it’s autumn and there’s a bird in the tree that imitates a telephone when it sings. Your hair is silver but you are not old. Under your soft silver hair is your skull with your central nervous system inside it. It is dusk and it has started to rain. The roots of the eucalyptus tree that grows in the garden are spreading under the house. Our daughter is sleeping inside the house under a photograph of the sea. She is covered in a thick blanket. Her bed stands on a green carpet. There are two stains on the carpet.
You are wearing a white shirt and a suit and under your soft silver hair is your skull. While you speak the honest truth I am thinking about the time we ate horse steaks in Paris. The waiter served the dish of the day and the dish of the day was horse. It was like eating a unicorn in the twenty-first century. My iPod was playing a song we’d never heard before. You untangled the headphones and pressed them into your ears and you lifted my fingers and pressed them into your mouth.
But now we are standing in the garden and the telephone bird has stopped making calls no one answers. The car alarms and police sirens have stopped too. Silence is cruel in cities where missing people need to hide in noise. But we are standing in the garden in the rain and you have not stopped telling me the honest truth and I wonder if the telephone bird will one day learn to sing computer start-up sounds.
Your silver hair is wet. Our daughter is pretending to sleep inside the house under a photograph of the sea and she’s listening to the rain which always makes sorrow bigger and hard things softer. I walk towards you, bumping into things on the way. Kissing you is like new paint and old pain. It is like coffee and car alarms and a dim stairway and a stain and it’s like smoke. I am looking into your eyes and I can’t get in. You have changed the locks and I have an old key that doesn’t fit and our daughter is making her way across the garden towards us, holding her thick blanket. You are telling me you are dead, and I say yes, I know you are. We miss you and since you’ve gone I’ve forgotten all my pin numbers, I can’t remember the code to my gym locker or where the honey is or where I put the blue pillowcase – and could you tell me, again, where exactly the sea is, in that photograph?
Simon Tegala’s Heart in 12 Parts
1
Simon Tegala leaned his back against the wall of the American Embassy and held her against him. It was an electrical event. Small voltages spread through their limbs. She said, Honey, that was a test burn. She heard his heart sounds: lub dup lub dup lub dup. She noted they were fifth in the queue for visas. Naomi was the Newton of atomic kissing; erotic radioactivity buzzed through her blackberry lips. They had been told to produce proof of identity in triplicate. Driving license, passport and a household bill. Naomi would not let Simon Tegala see the photograph in her passport. She said, Stop looking for me. I am here standing next to you listening to your heart sounds. He knew that her lips were the only country he wanted to be in.
2
Simon Tegala decided to throw the I Ching to discover if Naomi loved him. At that moment the phone rang. While his father’s voice disappeared into his answering machine Naomi walked into his apartment carrying something for supper wrapped in wax paper. When she asked him why he was so quiet and what he was thinking about, he said SHAKING. My father has Parkinson’s disease. They salted the chicken and cooked it in its own sweet juices
while the phone rang again. His father’s voice said AMERICA and then it said DID YOU GET YOUR VISA and then he said other words which upset Simon Tegala. DON’T LIVE FAR AWAY. Naomi pointed to a red felt hat that hung on the coat hook in Simon Tegala’s kitchen. He told her it was a fez and she told him it was a chechia. What is a chechia, her boyfriend wanted to know. It’s a fez, she replied. And then she said, shall we go and visit your father and take him a cake?
3
Later, Naomi said to Simon Tegala, I want you to touch my body in the following order:
3. My ear
5. My belly
Simon Tegala’s heart is a biomachine beating hard and fast as he searches for the missing numbers.
4
Mr Tegala is sitting in a cafe drinking a mug of tea thinking about how his father shakes and jerks his head and arms. Images of projected futures whir like a science fiction behind his eyes. He decides he wants to spend Christmas Day with her but fears she might think he’s getting ahead of himself because it’s only July. And anyway, he hardly knows her.
5
Naomi said, What do you mean you hardly know me? Simon Tegala stretched out his arm and tickled the nape of her neck where a curl had escaped from her hair clip. Tell me about your mother your father your brothers and sisters, Naomi. Look, Simon Tegala, his girlfriend replied, the past is a place I have left behind. I want to arrive somewhere else. How am I going to get there if I hang out with a cyclist who has no car to run his girlfriend or his ageing father around town?
6
While he negotiated with the car salesman, it occurred to Simon that this man had a substantial volume of blood pumping through a purple vein on his forehead. The salesman (who wore a thick gold wedding ring on his finger) was pointing at the vintage Cadillac of Simon Tegala’s dreams. Mr Tegala the customer had suddenly become butcher. He saw the salesman merely as a sum of parts with blood flowing between, through and around them. A biological highway of organs, venules and veins. The salesman, unaware that he was perceived merely in terms of circulation of the blood and lymph, smiled and said he’d make a friendly price for Mr Tegala. As they walked over to his office to complete the deal, the salesman twisted the band of gold round and round his knuckle.
7
When Simon Tegala said to Naomi, Perhaps we can talk about Christmas Day, she gazed out of the window of his new old Cadillac and pointed to a white cat sitting on a wall.
8
Mr Tegala plays back three messages from his father on his answering machine and decides to drive to a late-night movie on his own.
9
The usherette shone her torch on a red velvet seat and sat Simon Tegala next to a woman eating an ice cream in a cone. Halfway through the movie, the woman told Simon Tegala that her name was Caroline Joseph. At that same moment the plot took a twist. Simon Tegala had missed a crucial clue and the film made no sense from then on. On the screen a man swam in a pool of salt water. A woman in a bikini waved to him from a rock. Simon Tegala sneaked a look at Caroline Joseph. Her eyes were like spark plugs shining in the dark. She was all sharp edges, lathed and polished. So very different from Naomi. The film had a happy ending. When Caroline Joseph put on a jacket with a fake ermine-trimmed hood, Simon Tegala found himself saying, ‘I’ve just bought a new Cadillac. Do you want a ride home?’ Caroline Joseph was so perfect she looked like she’d just stepped off the production line of a factory in Germany. He unlocked the door of his new old Cadillac and she eased herself in, admiring the white leather seats and the way he gripped the steering wheel. She told him she lived in Hammersmith with her dog, a terrier called Bobby. Would he like to meet Bobby? Simon Tegala nodded enthusiastically. When he woke up next to Caroline Joseph the following morning she told him all about her family and he told her he was in love with Naomi.
10
Naomi said to Simon Tegala: It’s over between us. I can’t believe you wanted more sex magic because you think your father is dying. Simon Tegala’s heart has two chambers: the upper chamber and the lower chamber. Blood flows between these chambers. Simon Tegala’s heart is the size of his fist. What were you thinking, his ex-girlfriend shouts as she slams the door. Simon Tegala says, SHAKING. I was thinking about SHAKING.
11
This is his sixth day without Naomi. As Mr Tegala rides his bicycle to the pub, he hums his favourite Leonard Cohen song. A passing truck knocks him into the gutter. Simon Tegala is bleeding and bruised and he can’t stand up. Apparently someone has called an ambulance. He wonders if Naomi would leave him if she knew Leonard Cohen was his hero. And then he remembers Naomi has left him anyway.
12
The nurse in Casualty asks Mr Tegala if he knows anyone who can drive him home. Simon Tegala winces because she is taking out the glass shards in his thigh with long silver tweezers. The nurse says, ‘Now look up, because I’m going to put some antiseptic on your chin.’ When he looks up he sees Naomi leaning against the wall, holding a brown paper bag full of apples. Look over there, Naomi says, and she points to the door. Simon Tegala sees his father waving at him with his right hand because his left hand is holding a steel crutch. His father is wearing a hat and an overcoat and he is speaking. The only person in the room who can understand him is Simon Tegala because his father can only whisper. We’ve come to get you son, the taxi is waiting outside. Next time keep your eyes open when you ride a bicycle. Naomi’s red heels click across the floor towards Simon Tegala and then she is just one centimetre away from his lips.
Roma
Her husband who is going to betray her is standing inside the city of Roma. She is talking to him over the wall because she is not invited inside. She says, ‘You’ve broken my heart,’ in the way an actress might say it. Standing by the fountain in the centre of Roma is the woman who admires her husband. She walks past him in jeans and trainers. Her neck and cheeks are flushed.
When she wakes up from this dream about her husband betraying her, the traitor is lying by her side. A radio in the room next door announces that the Federal Reserve has dropped interest rates in the USA and European markets are expected to follow suit. She puts her hand here and there on her husband’s warm body and tells him nothing about her dream. In five hours they will be out of the British weather. They will spend four days in Portugal and then return to the UK for Christmas. Their bags are packed. A cab will call for them. The lodger in the room next door, Mr Patel, the man who listens to the radio all day long, has bought her a present for the trip. A slab of Ayurvedic soap made from eighteen herbs.
It has been raining in Portugal for three days and nights. She walks down to the sea with her husband. The drenched succulents and rotting fishing boats have the same atmosphere of betrayal she experienced in her dream. She stares into the shallows of the salt lagoon. A stork stands in the mud.
And another.
Her husband takes a photograph of the two storks. When she holds his bag for him he comments on how pleasant her hands smell. She tells him it’s the Ayurvedic soap that Mr Patel gave her and that he should try it too. That night they eat in the Cafe Emigrante. A shack restaurant in the poorer part of the village. Varnished bamboo poles line the crumbling walls inside. The cook throws bloody fish onto smouldering charcoal. They break bread, scoop up white cheese and shrivelled, sour olives. Outside it is raining again. Their hotel room is not a place that invites intimacy. The cold marble floor. The thin blankets that are not warm enough for December in the Algarve. Two single beds pushed together. She finds Roma once again in her dreams and it is a warmer place to be.
The river is full of stars in Roma. Baroque water flows over rocks and stones. Her husband who is going to betray her sits at a table with his admirer eating almond Easter cakes, iced white in the shape of small bells. His admirer is strong. Desire has made her strong. Her skin is tanned. Her eyes and hair are black. She shakes the three green bracelets on her wrists and says, ‘I have thought about what you have to say and it’s interesting.’ His wife watches from the othe
r side of the wall. ‘He is in love,’ she thinks. She knows he is trying not to be in love.
In the morning they dip sweet sponge cakes into milky coffee in the Cafe Emigrante. The siren from the factory on the other side of the river calls people to work. Women run out of houses clutching carrier bags and sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. This reminds her of the paper the Ayurvedic soap was wrapped in. The letters carved into the green soap told her it was called M-e-d-i-m-i-x and it was made in a factory in Chennai.
Returning to London. The same old bus routes. The dirty old roads. The Christmas trees glimpsed through windows of London houses. Blue lights glowing through the pine needles. She looks down at a scrap of paper in her hand. It tells her to buy a turkey. She invites Mr Patel to join them for Christmas lunch. Again he tells her how much he is enjoying his stay in the United Kingdom. There are no mosquitoes, no humidity, less pollution.
It is snowing.
It never snows in Roma. It is August in her dream. Romans leave their stifling city. They pack their bags and make off to the coast and mountains to swim in lakes and recover from the knocks and disappointments of the year. She sees her husband waiting for his admirer at a cafe that is closed for summer. The shutters are down. The tables and chairs stacked up. His wife knows what she must say to her husband from the other side of the wall. She says, ‘You totally enriched my life.’ His face is impassive but he cries. Tears fall from his eyes and arrange themselves on his cheek like Man Ray tears.
On Christmas Day she kisses her sleeping husband and opens the window. The radio in the next room describes the current peace talks, an American initiative in the Middle East. As they open their presents in bed, her husband wishes her a happy Christmas but she interrupts him. She says she knows he wants to leave her. She says she has noticed he has not unpacked his bags from Portugal. She says she understands he is in love with someone else but does he think there is a chance they might make it through the coming year? He tells her this is true and he doesn’t know what to do and he was waiting to tell her but he could not find the words. She does not tell him that she has been standing outside the city of Roma, watching and talking to him over the wall.
