Her nipples are small and pink, like her fingernails. ‘Kiss my breasts!’ she commands Gibby. ‘Touch my nipples.’ But she’s writhing so vigorously that it’s difficult for him to accurately target any area. Now she’s fumbling with his belt, now the button of his trousers. Chi-chinnggg! She kicks out with one foot and the metal shelves quiver. Paperclips rain down in a small silver shower.
Flustered, Gibby closes his eyes and tries to remember the Nicolette he’d first met. Slender body, dark braids, some sort of embroidered blouse. Standing in front of a noticeboard, arms crossed, looking (wrongly, it turned out) like the perfect anachronism. He’d stared at her for a full minute, anchored by her straight back, reassured by her absorption. A still point in a world spinning so fast that people fell off the edges of buildings.
She’s making small moaning sounds, and he opens his eyes. She’s almost naked but this doesn’t distract him from the fact that a long strand of her hair is wrapped around the button on his cuff. What range does it give him? Tentatively, he reaches out. Almost nothing. His right arm might as well be tethered to his side.
‘Come on!’ Nicolette sounds impatient. Her tiny hands are worming their way into his boxer shorts.
Desperately, he tries to unwind her hair from his cotton wrist. Shit, wrong way. ‘Sorry,’ he ventures. ‘There’s a small problem. You’re caught on my cuff.’ Yet this isn’t the main problem. Nicolette is writhing, the shelves are rattling, the mat is bunching; the entire stationery room is working itself into a frenzy — but all he can think about is freeing himself.
‘What the fuck’s wrong?’ Nicolette raises a flushed face; in fact, her entire freckled body is slightly flushed.
‘You look beautiful, and I want you,’ Gibby says honestly. ‘But I don’t want you enough.’ He squeezes his eyes tightly shut again, this time to protect himself from the fallout.
It doesn’t go well — but what can you expect, when you’ve virtually promised yourself to a workmate, encouraged her to sacrifice her break, and then reneged on the offer? He’s never had underwear thrown at him before, and it’s less enjoyable than he imagined.
‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’ Her cheeks are almost the same colour as her hair. She fastens her shirt with such ferocity that Gibby, wincing on the mat, waits for buttons to ping, the ammunition of the jilted. Pulling on one boot, she clutches at a shelf and brings down a roaring cascade of printer cartridges.
The threat of overwhelming noise again! Gibby bows his head, execution-style, willing the chaos to pass over him.
‘I suppose you’re gay,’ hisses Nicolette. ‘Is that why you didn’t ask me to your father’s stupid work-do?’
‘I’m sorry,’ mutters Gibby. And he is, not only for Nicolette and her wounded pride but also for himself. How much easier it would be if we could choose where we fall! If we could simply decide to tumble into convenient, sensible, lonely-alleviating love!
‘Fuck you!’ Nicolette cuts off his stumbling explanations about saving her from futureless and certainly clumsy sex by throwing a block of A4 paper at him. It hits him just above his right eye with the force of a tree falling.
‘Just deserts, I suppose.’ He speaks to the now empty room. The felled forest, the wronged girl and, outside, the deliberate fabrication of real tragedies. He’d raise his eyebrows at it all but it would hurt his forehead too much.
By the time he’s straightened his clothes, swept up a thousand paperclips and rolled up the mat, his eye is so swollen that he can hardly see. He makes his way carefully along the corridor, hoping to find a dark empty corner where he can lie down and wait out the three hours before his shift starts.
Up ahead of him the staff-room door stands wide open. Voices spill out, running along the carpet, all the way to the toes of his new white shoes. ‘He couldn’t get it up?’ ‘He wasn’t turned on by you?’ ‘Is he a homo?’ For a moment he considers wading on by, but then he changes his mind and marches away towards the lift.
‘Not coming in tonight,’ he shouts to Jason, who’s doing one of his back-to-back marathon sessions.
‘What? Why?’ Jason’s winching up the back of a lorry with a fine display of maximum effort. He peers under his arm at Gibby.
‘Goodbye,’ says Gibby.
He leaves via the loading bay to avoid a lynching by middle-aged film-makers dressed as teenagers. There they all are, clustered at the feet of the bunny girl, lights shining upwards in an approximation of power, trained on the fictionally screwed and screwed-up hero. ‘Goodbye,’ calls Gibby, sketching a wave.
His white feet are bouncy but perfectly steady. No cars at the intersection, but all the same he waits for the pedestrian light to go green. Today has had a dangerous feel to it — too many beginnings and ends.
Green light. He marches. No looking back at the place where he’s worked since he was fourteen. He’s not sure why he’s left but he knows it’s something to do with the red-haired boy. Something to do with the thud when the boy landed in the cart, with the moment when he opened his dazed green eyes, pupils flaring with elation at the few free-falling seconds when he hadn’t belonged anywhere at all. And Gibby starts to run, leaping and bounding on his seven-league sneakers, grabbing rain-heavy branches and releasing showers as he flies towards a new start.
TRYING TO REMAIN INVISIBLE
BRIGHT IS TRYING TO remain invisible until he leaves. The world is sickening him in a way he thought he’d left behind. Indifference, it seems, is a luxury enjoyed by almost everyone but himself.
He can only go out if he’s wearing sunglasses, a cap and a large pair of headphones. ‘What are you listening to?’ asks Eduardo, who takes a passing interest in music in the hours between poker games.
Bright pulls the cord from his pocket: attached to nothing. ‘I don’t want people talking to me on the street.’ Kitted out in his camouflage gear, ears and eyes covered, he feels insulated from what’s around him. Wearing dark glasses on overcast days makes it hard to avoid lamp posts and uneven pavements, but at least they stop him from seeing his surroundings in sharp relief. The beggar in the foyer of the bank with a raw, chewed-off thumb; the drunk kicking his cowering dog outside the supermarket. Without Polaroid protection, these sights rub themselves into Bright’s vision and make his eyes sting.
Arriving home also makes him nervous. The climb to his door seems very much further than the nineteen floors he’d managed some weeks ago. His building is full of rich idle residents who hover in their hallways, pretending to arrange lilies, hoping for footsteps in the stairwell and some conversation. Even before he starts up the stairs he has to pass Tom’s watchful eye. In spite of Bright’s disguise, Tom recognises him as soon as he sidles in the door. ‘Messages for you, Mr O’Connor!’ he’ll say. Or, ‘How’s the temperature out there?’ — harmless statements and questions that nonetheless raise a sweat under Bright’s shapeless army coat.
‘I don’t like dressing as a tramp,’ he tells Eduardo. ‘It offends my sense of style. But right now I can’t trust anyone.’ Is it the day of the Square, the Station and the Shopping Mall that has shaken his confidence, or the fact that he isn’t writing at the moment? Every time he opens his notebook he’s back on the ledge, with the pair of hands at his back. Then he feels nauseous and faint. The blank white page is the inverse of empty darkness; both hold the terror of limitless possibility.
‘Very wise.’ Eduardo mixes martinis with the skill of an elderly gentleman. ‘The fewer one trusts, the better one does for oneself.’ He’s speaking from experience. His early years were spent on the railway tracks of Buenos Aires; the only food he got was what he could steal. ‘You like it with a twist, no?’ He offers Bright a chilled, steaming glass.
‘Just a sip and I must go.’ Bright already has his cap and glasses on. Dressing and undressing has begun to seem not only time-consuming but exhausting. He’s all too aware of the daily task awaiting in his room, growing by the day — but his exit date is drawing near. And it must be finished before h
e leaves! The thought of abandoning it is another thing that makes his stomach clench.
‘You are an artist,’ nods Eduardo with the wisdom of the half-drunk. ‘Your job is never done. No wonder you’re jumpy. The Alps will be good for you.’
Downstairs, stuck on Bright’s door, is a note from Tom. ‘Your father called. He wants to know why you never answer your phone.’
Bright screws up the note and turns to survey the jigsaw, spreading over the bed like moss. Already, it looks larger and more impossible than when he sloped out earlier to buy pizza. The Empire State building still has no top, although the Statue of Liberty is complete and clutching a monstrous torch that points accusingly to the box of loose pieces. A two-thousand-piece job — which means that Bright has had to stop sleeping on the bed, instead lying on a towel on the floor with a folded jacket as a pillow. ‘Hard on the joints, but adequate,’ he comments to the tiny silent room, crammed with jagged fragments of the New York skyline.
Kneeling by the bed, he looks at the dozens of sullen grey pieces that may become sky. He doesn’t know why he’s become so obsessed; he only knows he has to continue. ‘God save me,’ he says, though even by the age of six he’d been sure no one was listening to his prayers. Why had his parents believed that only African children needed saving? This still puzzles him, especially when the sound of cold water roars in his ears again (‘Baths are good for you,’ cackles Baynes, one of the most feared prefects in the school).
And at the memory he’s shrinking again: to a speck of dust, to the smallest pin stuck in the sole of the world. Trodden on, trodden down, until he’s flattened and battered, and less than zero. ‘Fuck you all,’ he says in a quavering voice — to his do-gooder mother, his ramrod father, and the spotty-faced bullying Baynes. He crams on his headphones and blasts Zadok the Priest into his ears for courage. His phone lies dusty and silenced between piles of books, no doubt crammed with demanding messages from his father. Why haven’t you been in touch; your publisher is trying to reach you; your stepmother is hurt that you’ve ignored her invitation to dinner. Just imagining turning the phone back on and plugging himself back into the shouting world makes his forehead clammy.
‘I’ll deal with you later,’ he says to the phone, but Handel’s choir is swelling so loudly in his ears that he can’t hear his own promise. He needs fresh air. Sweating, shoving on his sunglasses, he stumbles over pieces of Manhattan to the door.
SAVAGE DAWN
THE DAWN IS BRUISED orange, the colour of over-ripe apricots. Lace pulls a newspaper over her head like a tent and lies still, barely breathing.
Above and below her, doors are slamming. The building always wakes early, full of big-bosomed mothers and dark-suited fathers, like a return to the 1950s. ‘It’s in an up-and-coming area,’ Chummie announced when signing the lease. ‘You’ll be perfectly safe coming home at night.’ Lace is worried not by the streets but by the hallways she glimpses through partially ajar front doors. Crammed with prams, cluttered with plastic, air so thick with bright-lipstick desperation that she sprints to get inside her own front door.
There’s been a spate of communal activity recently: a table tennis tournament in the garden, a late summer barbecue on the concrete rectangle between the bike shed and the recycling bins. ‘I can’t go.’ These are Chummie’s words. He’s not averse to team spirit, but he’s always working unsociable shifts. ‘Well, I can’t go!’ This is Lace, who’s an oddity to her blue-denim neighbours, with her flower-like face, feathery dresses and flyaway hair. The mothers smile gamely, pulling their jumpers firmly down over their jeans and pulling their children away by the wrists. The fathers? Well, they can’t help but stare, wondering why someone like Lace lives with a stick-insect man whose head is too big for his body.
‘We’re doomed if we go, and doomed if we don’t,’ adds Lace. ‘If you sideline yourself from a community, sooner or later you get eaten alive or trampled to death.’
Chummie looks concerned. He doesn’t have time at present for neighbourly relationships, but it’s highly possible that one day he might need a cup of sugar or a couple of eggs. ‘We don’t want to cause offence. I’ll put a notice up in the hallway, explaining why we can’t come right now. I’ll say that I’m working all hours and that you — that you’re —’
‘A freak?’ says Lace.
Chummie peers at her, then relaxes. ‘Oh, you’re joking.’
‘Not really.’ She can imagine the havoc were she to walk into next week’s house meeting in Mr Angelo’s flat. As always happens when she enters a crowd, she would be surrounded instantly by a magnetic field. Men would edge towards her, and women away. Her presence would scorch the carpet and set the new set of suggested rules ablaze. ‘What about living by my rules?’ she might say. ‘No one goes to bed until the sun starts to rise. Everyone throws away their alarm clocks. And you have to leave for work at a different time than you did yesterday, and a different time again tomorrow.’
But she’s a loner amidst mortar-and-brick solidarity. Thus, although she may enter Mr Angelo’s fantasies, she won’t be entering his flat next week, disrupting her neighbours’ discussions of how to regulate each other’s lives. On this fierce orange morning, from under her newsprint shelter, she listens through the walls to other people’s routines. A kettle screaming, followed by quick footsteps, followed by silence. Water for pre-work showers rushing and thundering. The door to the street thudding, letting men out and shutting women in, shaking her sofa until she feels seasick.
STOP SUFFERING. She’s opened her eyes and is reading the inside of her paper roof. STOP SUFFERING. She stares at half a face; one large grainy eye stares back into hers. She sits up, the paper falls, the sudden light hits her retinas and makes her wince.
STOP SUFFERING IN AFRICA! It’s a two-page spread, and an enormous smooth-cheeked man is exhorting her to give generously to starving children in the name of the Lord. ‘The Right Reverend O’Connor,’ she reads. A full-blown name, and it suits him; his lips are plump, and his hair springs from his head with black-and-white certainty. He looks more important than God.
She reads the news section standing up, eating yoghurt with a soup spoon. The soapy flavour of blueberry: she’s never much liked it, but at least it slips easily down her throat. What else? The open fridge breathes a chill over her feet. She finds a saucepan of spaghetti sauce made by Chummie several days earlier: tinned tomatoes, minced meat, metallic taste.
Her pile of university acceptances slithers on the bench. Decision-making has become increasingly hard. Yesterday, for instance, she spent an hour deciding whether or not to go to the swimming pool one block away. How to inform Cambridge Oxford Princeton Harvard et al. that she’s unable to believe in tomorrow, let alone next year? She’s still standing vacantly beside the fridge, empty saucepan in hand, when Gibby’s text comes through.
Coffee @ Valentines 11.
Is it a suggestion or a plan? A question or a command? For an intelligent person Gibby fails to understand the importance of punctuation. The stack of letters topples, crows fly alarmingly close to the window, the surface of the day is already streaked with her tears. Leaving the flat seems a monumental effort — but staying is unthinkable.
‘Remind me again why you like this place?’ Every time they meet at Valentine’s Gibby asks this, in the cracked voice of an old Italian man. He’s already sitting by the window like an extra in a play, chewing on a toothpick, leafing through a newspaper. ‘Remind me again —?’ He uses the line as a greeting.
‘You like complaining. Admit it.’ Lace hangs her coat on a rickety hat stand.
Gibby studies the menu, though he knows it by heart. ‘Want to share the scrambled eggs, or have you had breakfast already?’
‘Yes. At least, I think so.’ Has she eaten today? In the past few weeks, an alarming development has occurred. As soon as she leaves somewhere, it no longer exists. The past is as shrouded in fog as the future.
‘Hello, dearies.’ It’s Myrtle. ‘We haven’
t seen you in here for a while.’ She stands patiently in her greying apron and wrinkled stockings, backed by her fading domain: net curtains at the windows, crocheted doilies on the tables, and a pond-like light that’s kind to women of a certain age.
‘How’s business?’ Gibby peers up at her.
‘Can’t complain. The whole Bingo club was in here yesterday for afternoon tea. I must admit, though —’ She lowers her voice and fluffs up her defiantly dyed chestnut hair. ‘It’s nice to see some slightly younger faces! People closer to my own age.’
Gibby’s clearly at a loss as to how to reply. He nods, gazing around at the blue-rinse, grey, silver and white heads of Myrtle’s customers and contemporaries.
Lace steps in quickly. ‘Can we order? I’ll have a date scone, please, and some apple strudel with whipped cream. Oh, and perhaps some toast with jam.’
Beaming, Myrtle pulls a pencil from her greying roots. ‘Sweet face, sweet tooth. That’s what they always said about me in my heyday. And what about you, dearie?’
‘He’ll have his usual insipid concoction,’ intercepts Lace.
‘Dearie!’ Myrtle looks shocked. ‘Hot milk’s very good for your bones, and warm water cleans out your waterworks a treat.’
‘Ha!’ Gibby looks triumphant.
‘And he’d like scrambled eggs,’ says Lace, ignoring him.
Once Myrtle has trundled off to the kitchen, Gibby leans forward and clears his throat like the president of a round-table discussion.
‘What is it?’ asks Lace. There’s something indefinably different about him today; his blurred outlines are more definite, he stands out from the faded rose wallpaper rather than receding.
‘I wanted to warn you not to call my house till we leave. My mother doesn’t know exactly where we’re going and she’ll try to squeeze the truth out of you.’ He hands over an envelope. ‘She saw this.’
Suicide Club, The Page 14
