Original Bliss

by A. L. Kennedy

  “And you think I could do the same with God.”

  “You can’t have faith if you need evidence. You used to have evidence—that’s very unusual—God touching you. Now He doesn’t do it. Perhaps that’s about faith. Do you call your God Him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her would sound odd? It?”

  “I know God’s not a person, but He has always suited me.”

  “So you do still believe in something about Him. Start with that. Not that I know anything about this.”

  “You’re making sense. And I will try.”

  “But don’t sound like that.” He caught at her elbow, then released her just as suddenly.

  “Like what?”

  “As if I’ve volunteered you to walk across hot coals. You’re not on your own, you know.”

  “You’re leaving tomorrow.”

  A little silence blundered between them after she said that, as if his absence drew in closer when they mentioned it. She wouldn’t miss him, she hadn’t known him long enough. He would be leaving her what he’d said, what she wanted; what she’d been looking for. Helen couldn’t think how many years had passed now, since she’d last got what she’d looked for. Nobody could just step up and cure her, but he’d done his best and, in this field, Edward’s best was the best there could be.

  He stretched and then folded his arms. “Yes. Yes I am going tomorrow, but I’m not ceasing to exist.”

  “No, you’re not.” Helen was sounding ridiculously glum which was bad of her—Gluck was doing all he could.

  “What do you want? Should I promise I’ll write?” Now he sounded uncomfortable, which was her fault.

  “You don’t have my address.”

  “You put it on top of your letter. I’m a genius—I notice that kind of stuff. Listen . . .” She found her hand taking his, recognising the heat and depth of the fingers. “Mm hm, hello again.” They both smiled, their mouths invisible. “Listen, I saw my mother hurt, physically, by someone else and that wasn’t the worst thing. I couldn’t bear the ways she hurt herself inside. Every year beyond the divorce, I’d see her cry while I opened my Christmas presents because, yes, she was happy about our being there together and safe—all of that—but she’d also convinced herself that anything she gave me wouldn’t be enough. She wanted to be married for me and make a good family. She robbed herself of joy. All the time. Like he had.”

  Edward nudged in beside her as his voice fell soft. “It wouldn’t take a Jung or a Freud to work out that I’m never going to like a woman I respect and care for being in emotional pain. I’m going to want to help.”

  Helen listened to his breathing and tried to remember the way she would be at home and the proper order of her life. She shivered with a small belief in the disapproval of Something other than herself. Edward shouldn’t write to her. It would be bad if he did: good, but bad. She loosed his fingers and rested her palms across her lap.

  “You needn’t write.”

  “I know I needn’t. I don’t need to do anything. I’ve worked for decades to reach the point where I can have that degree of choice. So I do what I want to and I want to write. Okay?”

  “Okay. But there can’t be . . . I should explain . . .”

  The cab slowed into the pedestrian precinct where her hotel hid itself. The coloured illumination from silent shop-fronts swept them both.

  “Ah, you see that?” Edward pressed to her side of the seat.

  “What?”

  “Welt Der Erotik. A chain of popular Bavarian sex shops. See them all over the place. I’m sorry, I’m changing the subject very badly because we’re nearly home. For you. You didn’t want to know about sex shops.”

  “I suppose I might have—”

  “No. I think you might not. Is this where you are?”

  “Oh.” She recognised the entrance. “Yes. This is it. Let me—”

  “No. You don’t pay for anything. Because this way you’ve had a nice time and you haven’t had to pay for it later. We’ve established that principle, which I think is good. I’m guessing you had a nice time, of course.”

  “Thank you. I did.”

  “Good.” He spoke a few words of German to the driver, who turned his engine off. “Now, Mrs. Brindle, we don’t have to make this look like goodbye forever.”

  “But it will be goodbye for a very long time.”

  “I should think that would look pretty much like forever, though, wouldn’t you?”

  “Then can I do something I want?”

  Something fluttered in the air between them, rocked.

  “Absolutely. Do your worst.”

  Helen did nothing bad, or worse, or worst. She rested a hand to his shoulder for balance and then executed motions that could be summarised as a kiss, the mildest relaxation of his lips leaving her with a sense of somewhere extraordinarily soft.

  Edward scratched his throat thoughtfully. “Well. I was going to do something I wanted as well, but now I’d just be kissing you back and I hate to be repetitive. Thanks.” He searched for something else to say and couldn’t find it. “Good night.” Eyes slightly taken aback by his ending so abruptly, he presented his hand, angled for shaking, and she accepted its weight.

  “Yes. Good night. And goodbye for a very long time.”

  “That’s right, but I won’t say so, because I do dislike goodbyes. So. Good night.”

  They let each other go.

  Helen walked herself across the hotel foyer and into the tight, brass lift with the porthole window that periscoped its way up to her floor and to her room and to her self.

  Her self wasn’t bad to be with tonight, not unpleasant company. She removed her sandals and her skirt, seeing how the heat and sitting had creased it and wondering when she’d begun to get so dishevelled: at the start of the evening, or later when it would have mattered less. Not that it actually mattered, either way.

  She took off her blouse. Several available mirrors told her there was too much contrast between her usual colour and the places on her body she’d allowed to see the sun. She didn’t look healthy, overall.

  With a little more attention, she watched as she unfastened her bra. Her breasts were not like a dancer’s, they lacked that kind of discipline, and they were larger. They had what she thought of as a better roundness. In spite of gravity. Probably not to everyone’s taste, but then they didn’t have to be.

  The bra was nice, too—she supposed, a sort of favourite, if she had such a thing—swapped at Marks and Spencer’s for one Mr. Brindle gave her on a birthday. He’d never noticed the change.

  Her knickers were the ones she’d bought at the airport because the airport was where she’d remembered that she’d packed none of her own. If a person has been very tired for a very long time, she will tend to forget things like that—essential items.

  When she was naked, the mirror stared back at her until she realised she was thinking of the Seven Deadly Finns and of laughing. The mirror smiled and then looked away. Surely to God she hadn’t been smiling like that all evening? That wasn’t how she’d meant to be. The mirror slipped back to its grin, it didn’t mind.

  In bed, she turned the light out and this wasn’t a problem.

  This wasn’t a problem.

  Somewhere, a door muttered closed, but there seemed to be nothing dreadful in the quiet between the building’s minor sounds. There was nothing like death in the dark. Helen was not tempted to lie and listen to the buzz of blood round her brain and wait for something bad to go wrong. Tonight she did not think forever would come and tell her how large it could be and how quickly she would disappear inside it. Forever would not make her alone, it would just remind her of Edward and saying goodbye forever with him which was sad but not frightening. She was determined within herself that there would be no more harm in darkness, only sleep.

  There was no harm in Edward, either; no harm in her choosing to not bath now, to not wash him away before she went to bed. Edward was an influence for good, because he wan
ted to be and because keeping a trace of him with her tonight was bringing her up against the force of Law. She was doing a little wrong, and finding Someone there who would object. A touch of her God was back. His disapproval set a charge in the air, a palpable gift.

  Perhaps because of this, she tucked her thoughts in under her eyelids and discovered she had the security she needed to reach for sleep. She rolled close up in the dark, pulled it round her skin and, for one soft second, knew she was all underway, about to be snuffed like a lazy light.

  Helen bumped and drifted down through a loosening awareness, before she stepped out and into a fully-formed dream. It was one she’d seen before, but not recently.

  Above her was the high, grubby ceiling of her old school’s Assembly Hall and everywhere was the sound of the tick of the loudest clock in the world. The invigilator paced. Helen had lifted her head and was resting inside the familiar discomfort of her school uniform—tight waistband, lots of black and blue.

  She was sitting her Chemistry Higher, the final paper, the one with long answers that had to be written out. She’d chosen her questions, managed the topics, been finished in good time.

  Fifteen minutes left. She was cautiously aware of other heads bowing, shaking, being scratched at with biro-ends.

  Twelve minutes left and there was no more anxiety. This hadn’t been so bad. She should just check things over now, take it easy and make sure she’d done her best. Her experimental drawings were lousy, but that shouldn’t matter much: they would work and they were clear and she wasn’t expected to be artistic, anyway.

  Eight minutes left and it hit. A tangible, audible, battering terror that coiled and span and folded round and round itself down from her collarbone, to mesh cold through her body and then push an inside ache along her thighs. Eight minutes left.

  She absolutely knew. She’d done it wrong. Helen had done it wrong. She was meant to check how many questions she should pick and get that absolutely right; it wasn’t very difficult after all: it was printed at the top of the paper for anyone but an idiot to read and one too many answers was almost as bad as one too few, but she had one too few which was the worst. Everything had been fine—now it was the worst.

  During her dream, time condensed as it did when she had been, in wide-awake reality, sitting and feeling the sweat from her hands beginning to distort her papers. Trying to avoid any sign of flurry, or any irregularity of breath, she had searched for a question she could possibly answer in not enough time—something even halfway likely. Organic, possibly.

  Even with so many years between her and the examination, even deep asleep, her mind could reproduce the horrible wordings of 14a, and 14b, through to 14e.

  Part of her then had locked into problem-solving, while her hands had twitched themselves towards legibility. Part of her had been otherwise concerned. Five minutes left and the lick of fear inside her swam into place and fixed her flat to something she had never known before. With the fifth and final section of question 14 still undone, her eyes closed without her consent and the proper force of panic began to penetrate. Rolling smoothly in from the small of her back, she had the clearest sensation of rapid descent, of wonderful relaxation and then monumental tension holding in and reaching in and pressing in for something of her own that wasn’t there, but would be soon.

  Helen tried not to smile or frown. She steadied herself against an insistent pressure breaking out between her hips and sucking and diving and sucking and diving and sucking her fast away. Four minutes, three minutes, two. A shudder was visible at her jaw.

  And then her breathing seemed much freer and she was perhaps warm, or actually hot, but oddly easy in her mind. She slipped in her final answer, just under the given time, before sitting back and watching the man who was her Chemistry teacher collect in what he needed from them all. She wondered briefly what he was like when he went back home beyond the school where both of them did the work they were expected to.

  He was a man. She’d been told about men. Men had necessary orgasms which allowed them to ejaculate and have children. Women’s orgasms, on the other hand, had been hinted around in Biology as a relatively pointless sexual extravagance.

  Helen had very recently decided she was quite in favour of pointless sexual extravagance.

  She’d felt strange walking out of the hall, secret, and barely curious about her marks for Chemistry.

  Helen’s night-time mind was able to observe while the door through which her younger self was leaving gently tipped and shivered and folded down into a small horizon, out of her way. She was alone in a sunlit space now, with something like a fountain for company and a figure far off, but walking towards her and holding yellow papers in his hand. Helen couldn’t think why he seemed familiar—he had no tell-tale points to give a clue—still, she knew him. She recognised him in her sleep.

  Helen twisted from her side on to her back, one unconscious hand still resting near her waist. Her dream dipped closer, licked at her ear, hard and dark, and said, “Do not look at the man. Do not look at him unless you have to and sometimes you will have to because he will be there. Then you can look, but you must never for a moment think that you want to fuck him, to fuck him whole, to fuck him until all his bones are opened up and he can’t think and you’ve loosened away his identity like rusty paint. Don’t think you want to blaze right over him like sin. Don’t think you want to fuck him and fuck him and then start up and fuck him all over again. Do not think about fucking him. Think of your intentions and he will see, because they will leak out in the colour of your eyes and what do you think will happen then?”

  Helen, warm in her dream, began to smile and the man and the sunlight across him began to sink and slur away. Thinking of nothing at all, or nothing harmful, she moved towards a very pleasant rest.

  “Mrs. Brindle? Helen? Hello?”

  Her hand had reached for the telephone without the ring of it having fully woken her.

  “Mrs. Brindle?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “You sound groggy, that’s wonderful.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Edward. Edward Gluck. You were asleep, weren’t you? And I thought you would be out by now and seeing sights . . . I suppose Stuttgart does have sights— has anyone said? You’ve slept.”

  “Yes, I . . . Professor, Edward—I suppose I must have been asleep.”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Time?”

  “The time of day. No, don’t bother looking I’ll tell you—two o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “What?”

  “Two o’clock. Do you feel better? No, you won’t be feeling anything, yet. Wonderful. You slept. I’m so glad, really I am. First time in a while, hm? Good. The reason I was calling: I thought we might discuss your diet.” He seemed to be hurrying over a catalogue of topics he might wish to hit. “The timing of your meals and their composition; there isn’t too much available about the dietary requirements of the Process in the public domain. I mean, you won’t have read about it. So have lunch with me. How do you feel? Did I ask that?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t—Is it really two o’clock?”

  “Ten past the hour. You’ll be hungry soon.”

  “You’re leaving today. You don’t have time.”

  “Always have time for your interests, Helen, you never know what they’ll give you, if you let them have their head. I’ll meet you by Reception at three, no three fifteen.”

  “Reception here?”

  “Yes, Reception here. Your hotel. Three fifteen. You slept. Well done. Oh, and goodbye. Bye.”

  For some time, she kept the receiver by her head and listened to the tone on the line. When she felt sure that Edward’s call had happened and that she was awake, she began to feel happy. Happy was the first emotion of her day and a person couldn’t ask much more than that. She got up.

  Helen stood in the bath and opened the shower, let it roll down her body, nicely cool and good to lift her arms in and turn
underneath.

  Past two o’clock in the afternoon; that meant she’d been out for more than twelve hours and she felt like it, too, extremely relaxed. She didn’t dwell too deeply on her excursions into Stuttgart the night before, but she was glad to admit that the miniature Process she and Edward made together must have set to work. She had been right to come here and had been rewarded with sleep. She tried to think of something thankful she might say to God.

  The clean flow of the shower washed her free of any after-taste her dreams could have been tempted to leave. Now she deserved a celebration with the man who had helped her begin to be put right.

  Gluck was sitting at the side of the Reception desk, dressed down in blue jeans and a grey shirt. He was more obviously slim today and it occurred to Helen that he might well be quite physically fit, not only active in the brain. He unfolded himself upwards and offered his hand.

  “Ah, Helen.”

  “Edward.”

  “Yes, Edward, you remembered.” He said that in a way that made sure she could tell he was pleased to be Edward with her. Edward would be what he preferred, not Professor Gluck. “So, good afternoon. You look well. Terrific.”

  They went and ate beef with onion gravy and little noodles and extra bread and then something with hot cherries in and Helen was hungry for all of it. Edward observed her appetite and talked seriously, almost formally, about the chemical implications of his work. If he knew enough about her—purely factually—he could work out a programme of general nutrition and supplements that would definitely help her to at least feel more contented for more of the time.

  “Are you suggesting anti-depressants?”