Fabulous

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Peter was the bravest. He stayed around. All that day till midnight he was going from pub to bar to barbershop. He wanted to know why it happened. He nearly got taken himself. But what was the point of that? It was too late to make any kind of deal. The rest of us split. It was left up to Double-M, as we called her. She was the only one of us to be still there the morning after. She saw a couple of them come back at first light and start digging a hole. It was dismal weather. The hole kept filling with water, and its sides collapsed. Three times that happened, before they gave up. They heaved aside a slab from one of those mausoleums that look like little houses. They lifted his broken body inside and dumped it on a kind of ledge thing. Then they got back in their transit and drove off, windows up, radio on.

  I went out through the gap in the wall as soon as the van was gone. It was Saturday, and once the cemetery was properly open it would fill up with little kids on scooters punting along behind the dads jogging. I walked around all day and then I bought some wine and pitta bread. I had a confused idea that I ought to celebrate. He’d never screamed, never whimpered. I call that something. So that night I crept back. There were girls doing business but we never take any notice of each other, even if we’re opposite sides of the same tree. I slept up against the wall of his little house.

  Sunday morning I drank from the standpipe they used to water the primulas on the graves. I tied my hair back and picked the sleeping dust out of my eyes. I peed round behind the clump of hazels. I composed myself. Tending bodies was my speciality. This was something I could usefully do. I went to the house of the dead and peered into the darkness. I could see his jacket – blue and yellow. It lay there, bundled up as though to cushion his poor smashed skull, but he was gone. That long, thin body had gone.

  I crawled into the darkness and howled. What does it matter? said mind. He’s dead anyway. You know that. You’re not getting him back. Your relations were not physical, ever. You never so much as ran a finger over his collarbone or fluttered your eyelash against his cheek. What does it matter where his carcass has gone? That was mind’s view. But body remembered how we had danced. Body said his shoulders were broad and his fingers were pale and there was a way the flesh around his jaw furrowed when he smiled that got me every time. I sat and thought about it until my feet were numb and then I stepped out and I saw someone else.

  When I was about three, or young enough anyway to need my mum to be in my field of vision the whole time, like every second of every minute of the day, I was in the park with her, and I was watching some ants coming up out of a hole in the earth. They found a biscuit-crumb, and they got together in a great disciplined work-gang and tugged it – it was like a boulder as big as a house door for them – back to the hole, and the hole wasn’t big enough. They tried one way and they tried another way, and it was about the most fascinating thing I had ever seen, these tiny creatures so hard at work.

  I couldn’t stop myself. I put out my finger and touched the crumb. I was horrified because I had gone in my mind into the ants’ world but my poking finger was like a giant’s and at once I was back to being human-sized again and I looked up and there was my mother walking away and I ran as fast as I could after her, but that wasn’t very fast because my sandals were undone and I couldn’t keep up and I began to cry so loud the person looked round and she was just like my mother but I didn’t know her, or I knew her but I knew I was wrong to, because it wasn’t really her. It was a woman her sort of age and wearing her sort of jeans. You don’t really know what your mother looks like when you’re that young. She’s too much a part of you for you to step back and see her face. This woman was kind. She knelt down and said, Breathe very slowly. Pretend you’re an elephant and the air has to come all the way up your long trunk. If you do that you’ll be able to stop crying and then we can look for your mummy. But I was too distraught to pretend anything.

  My mother found us, and knelt down with the not-her woman and said Meg. Meg. Megalump. Quietly now. And my howling shuddered and slowed but I was still afraid because I looked at the two women and I saw long brown hair and faces pink from the sun and similar T-shirts and I thought, How do you tell the difference? How can I be certain sure which one is mine?

  I did lose my mother later, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t believe in presentiments.

  So, there was a man. He worked in the cemetery. Would you call him a gardener or a caretaker or a keeper? Whatever, those are all good words for him. He didn’t seem to think it was up to him to make judgments. He dragged away the fallen branches and threw out the dead flowers and cleared the brambles and binned the condoms and beer cans and sometimes I’d see him in his tool-shed, sitting rather hunched on the seat of a ride-on mower, and with his big fingers he was stitching away at a bit of coarse brown canvas, wools in old-rose and olive-green and silvery-blue trailing from his hands. I didn’t know his name, nor he mine, but that was all right. That wasn’t necessary.

  There were others who worked there, who shouted at each other, and made their machines roar. This one was matey enough with them but no more than that. He’d be there suddenly. You never heard him coming. And that morning, he was there. That’s what I thought. I said, Did you hear what happened? Any of the others, I’d have been afraid to make them think I was involved. But I didn’t mind him.

  He didn’t answer. He looked at me, that’s all. Very still. Passive. And then I knew it wasn’t him. It was him.

  The world went silent. My mind slipped out of gear as it does as you’re going to sleep. I believed everything and nothing. I thought this changes everything. I thought this is a blind alley in time with no significance and no consequences. I thought this is what joy feels like, so. I thought about my mother, and that other woman and the no-difference between them. I held out a hand. He took a dancing step towards me, one foot crossing over in front of the other in an unstable beautiful move from which you could only fall or fly away.

  He said, No touching. No problem, I said.

  TRISTAN

  ‘You’ll have to go and meet her.’

  ‘Why? Is she a half-wit?’

  ‘Her flight gets in at eleven fifty-five. Find her. Be sweet. Take her to lunch in Windsor – she’ll like that.’

  ‘What makes you think she’ll like it?’

  ‘Then bring her back here. Why are you being like this? It’s a question of politeness.’

  ‘Why can’t she just get the train. Is she a cripple or something?’

  ‘She’s physically perfect. As near to perfect as it’s possible to be.’

  ‘What’s she coming for?’

  ‘To marry me.’

  ‘What the fuck? Are you joking?’

  ‘No. This is real.’

  Silence

  ‘Why aren’t you meeting her then?’

  ‘You know I can’t. Not with the Fair on.’

  ‘You won’t miss half a day’s business for her, and you expect her to marry you.’

  ‘It’s a pity but … We discussed it. She knows I have to work. She kind of likes it. She likes knowing her man is this big busy deal-maker.’

  ‘She doesn’t. Nobody would. You’ve got to be there when she comes through the gate. Next to all the drivers with their bits of cardboard. You put your hand on the barrier and you vault lightly over it and you put your arms around her and lift her up so her feet are two inches off the floor and you bury your face in the side of her neck and she’s dropping things – passport, wallet, everything, the duty-free vodka, and you say …’

  ‘She’s actually appreciably taller than me.’

  ‘Oh. Oh. In that case I have to revise all my ideas. In that case you stand quite still at the end of the barrier and let her come to you, and she walks with long easy strides, she lopes, and she’s wearing a linen dress that’s like a coat and it billows out behind her and it’s unbuttoned at the front so that her legs are half bare and th
ey’re burnished like bronze swords and she doesn’t wear jewellery but there’s a leather thong around her neck and when she reaches you she puts a hand on your shoulder and she dips her head and she bites …’

  ‘Shut up, Tristan. She is actually a real person.’

  ‘Yes? So? Where did I say she wasn’t?’

  ‘She’s real so there’s no need to make her up.’

  ‘I like making people up. The people I make up are much more amusing.’

  ‘More amusing than …?’

  ‘More amusing than you, you literal-minded old faggot.’

  ‘No more cheek. And no more homophobic language. I’m getting married.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Silence

  ‘And have you considered the possibility – has it crossed your mind for even one single second – and if it did would you give a toss about it – has it occurred to you that if you really are doing this thing, then you might be breaking my heart?’

  ‘Eleven fifty-five. Terminal 3. Car keys on the hall table. Have dinner with us tonight.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘With me and my girl.’

  The things that Mark Cornwall bought and sold were – at least purportedly – very old indeed. Their monetary value was more closely related to their antiquity than to their beauty. His regular clients liked to hold an Egyptian basalt hawk, or an agate bull from Mesopotamia, and feel the centuries thrumming through the stone. No matter that the carving tended to be crude and the creatures depicted barely identifiable in the lumpen forms. You didn’t have to be superstitious to feel the potency of a thing that had been held and treasured and very, very gradually worn away by the stroking hands of generation upon generation of long-dead human beings.

  To get the non-specialist buyers in, though, you needed some straightforwardly lovely stuff. Alabaster always looked good, so long as you knew how to light it (Mark’s tech-guy really, really did). Fragments of Roman wall-paintings for colour. A Macedonian gold tiara for flash. Anything that had once been animate got attention. Mark had recently been amassing a stock of mammoths’ bones. Dutch trawlers brought them up in their nets from the bed of the North Sea. Quite a few people were interested. The big draw at his stall at this year’s Fair, more popular even than the tiny silken shoe of a Han dynasty princess, was the shoulder blade of a bison scratched all over with twig-like bipeds – a three-thousand-year-old hunting scene depicted by the predator on a left-over part of the prey.

  Mark was nervous, which was a condition so unfamiliar to him that he initially mistook it for oxygen-deprivation. ‘I’m going out for a breather,’ he said to the intern. ‘Text me at once if anyone looks like they’re getting serious.’ The intern had a vapid face, but there was something about the turn of her neck that reminded him of Izza and he felt the ground shift beneath him again. ‘Back in ten,’ he said.

  The park was full of football games. He stood on the temporary decking outside the Art Fair’s enormous marquee and watched groups of boys running, red-faced and determined, around and about each other. Viewed from above, he thought, they would have made swirling centripetal shapes, kinetic art. From his viewpoint they merely looked desperate.

  Kurt was there – fellow-dealer, rival, nosey-parker. He started to say something. Mark knew in advance the tenor of it – some innuendo about the footballers – and wanted nothing to do with it.

  ‘Congratulate me,’ he said. ‘I’m getting married.’

  ‘You?’ said Kurt, as though the first person singular pronoun might possibly have applied to someone else. ‘I had no idea you and Tristan had got that far.’

  ‘She’s called Izza,’ said Mark. ‘I saw her at the Biennale. She’s arriving today.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Kurt. ‘You’re not serious? You are serious. But you’re not …’

  ‘The marrying kind? Turns out I am. Tristan’s at Heathrow now, picking her up.’

  ‘You sent Tristan?’

  ‘Sure. They’re the same age. Nice for her.’

  ‘But not so nice for Tristan. The boy must be devastated.’

  ‘Oh well. He’ll live.’

  Kurt looked at him for a couple of beats. ‘You are a reptile, Mark Cornwall.’

  Mark said, ‘Hang on. I’m just a station he stopped off at.’

  Kurt said, ‘On the whole I’d say an absence of vanity was a positive attribute, but this is callous. You don’t know the effect you have on people.’

  ‘My oh my. Are you owning up to being besotted with me, Kurt?’

  ‘You shit.’

  The two men each put an arm across the other’s shoulder, and they walked together back into the Fair.

  Naturally enough, Tristan was expecting an androgynous being with a shaved head poised on a long etiolated body. Something not unlike the Ife terracotta deity (awfully late for Mark, but aesthetically bang up his street) that stood on the first-floor landing in the Little Boltons. Tristan wasn’t ready for the woman walking towards him, looking as though she was about to cry, or perhaps was already crying. He hadn’t imagined her to be someone he would ever get to know, so he had been staring at her shamelessly and without any kind of greeting on his face or welcome in his posture. She was pretty much right on top of him when she began speaking. On top, yes, because Mark was right, she really was tall.

  ‘Do you get met at airports often? I never have. I’d never thought. It’s so difficult isn’t it, getting the right expression on your face as you come through those doors? Did you think it was me? Of course not. Obviously. How could you know? And how to handle the luggage. It’s so awkward. This is Bronwen. Mark said you live with him. He implied he had teams of ephebes and so forth to fetch and carry for him, but I’m not going to be surprised if they turn out to be figments. Are you one of legions?’

  Which, if any, of her questions required an answer? Tristan said, ‘I’m Tristan.’

  Izza said, ‘Isolde.’

  Bronwen, neatly packaged in denim, was as compact as Isolde was wafty. She said, ‘You take this one, would you?’ and passed him the handle of one of the two immense mauve metal suitcases she’d been trundling. ‘You brought a car?’ He hadn’t expected another person. There was a lot about this encounter for which he hadn’t been prepared.

  Isolde, if that was what she was really called, looked like a bride. Not that she was in a big white dress, although her clothes were much more in evidence, more in need of tossing and twitching and generally tending, than the sleek suits and close-fitting dresses of the women who hung around the gallery. It was more the impression she gave of being entirely, defencelessly, on offer that was bridal. Her face was pale and the skin on it looked damp, as though she had been newly peeled. Her lips trembled slightly as she talked. Her large pale eyes shifted and misted, suggesting she needed glasses, not to see with, but to provide protective cover. Tristan thought that she would never initiate a contact, a relationship, a love affair, but always wait to be found, and that sometimes the person who sought her out might not wish her well, and that she was aware of that danger. Ungainly, superior, nervous, she reminded him of a horse he sometimes groomed. He had many little jobs.

  She said, ‘Where’s Mark?’

  ‘Didn’t he tell you, the Fair?’

  Evidently Mark had not told her.

  Bronwen stood silently waiting for something to resolve itself.

  Tristan said, ‘Mark thought you might like to go to Windsor, have lunch. He’ll be through by evening.’ He was beginning to rather like the idea of an afternoon in the Great Park with these odd young women. ‘I brought a picnic.’

  Again that look of imminent tears. He’d get used to it. It didn’t signal grief. Bronwen took over. ‘Let’s do it then. I can’t stand these places. You’re in short-stay?’

  She set off in the right direction. He followed and so did Izza
, talking in her breathy, curiously elderly voice, telling some story that, what with the recorded announcements, and the rattle of the suitcases’ wheels, he couldn’t follow. Something about someone getting injured in Venice, and her nursing him, and Mark being tied up in it somehow. How trite, he thought. Didn’t Mark know that everyone falls in love with nurses? It’s fear that triggers it, and then euphoria at being still alive, and so you think some perfectly ordinary overworked health-worker is your delivering angel. And when you go back for your check-up you get a bit of a jolt to see how they no longer have a halo, just grey panda-rings around their exhausted eyes. His interest in exploring ways of altering his consciousness had occasioned quite a few trips to A&E. After his last little mishap he’d actually made a date with an anaesthetist. Mistake.

  The Great Park, where kings have been hunting down stags and damsels for two millennia, is surrounded by mile upon mile of suburbia, of pebble-dash semis and harsh, unweathered red-brick mansions with high walls and electronic gates and security cameras that crane their necks to follow visitors up the driveways like dispassionate predatory birds. Even inside the park there are clumps of housing scattered among the clumps of trees. But for all the way that modern Outer London has infiltrated it, the park is still a wilderness. It is not hard at all to get lost there.

  ‘I think if we go that way we’ll get to the Long Walk,’ said Tristan, who was prone to claustrophobia. He wanted openness and majestic scale, not fidgety changes of mood between pinewoods and pools of bracken and driveways leading to Tudorbethan houses in bosky glades. Bronwen went ahead the way he indicated, hands clutching rucksack straps. Her gait was as neat and purposeful as the rest of her demeanour. Would she, he wondered, be moving into the Little Boltons as well? He rather hoped so. Izza’s softness and scattiness was beginning to tire him. Her conversation was elaborate. She was clever, obviously. She made sure everyone knew that. But she was also, he thought, helpless as a baby, and needed almost as much attention. Bronwen, like a confident nanny, was quite brusque with her. It was obvious they adored each other. Did Mark know that Bronwen looked like being a part of the marital ménage? Did Mark know anything?