Original Bliss

by A. L. Kennedy

  At the barrier she concentrated on lifting her bag ahead of her and feeding her ticket through correctly and on looking up only at the very last point she could.

  Edward.

  Edward making this home.

  Edward making this safe.

  She was taken by a liquid feeling that pained her while it pleased.

  Edward, already sidling through the crowd, cautiously tall, rummaged at the top of his hair with one hand, indisputably there. He lifted her bag away from her, took her arm and was ready when she swung in and held him and was able to hold her back.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello.”

  He was so much more of himself than she had remembered, even though she had tried to remember him well.

  “Welcome to Bailey Park.”

  Helen felt him rest his mouth against her hair and knew that people were walking round them, thoroughly inconvenienced. She didn’t feel guilty a bit.

  Outside there was a dry, grey, bite in the air and unfamiliar leaves, big like crumpled sheets of brown paper, were softening the pavement. They walked to Edward’s home, side against side, cradling each other’s waists because for two people walking together, this is the most comfortable way to proceed.

  “I won’t consider it.”

  “I have money. I mean, I’ll be able to get some. Tell me a good place to stay, that’s all I need.”

  “Helen, you don’t have any money, be sensible. You can be here.”

  “That’s not why I called you.”

  “I know that. There’s a room you can sleep in, will sleep in, and I will trust you, if you will trust me to do nothing but sleep. I’m hardly going to creep up on you in the dark—not one of my vices. If that’s what was worrying you. I can’t think of anything else, unless you just . . .” He burrowed his hands in each other uneasily. “You’ve come here because I’m your friend. I hope. I help my friends. Aaaw, come on, Helen. Let me help you out and do like Jimmy would—I’ve never hayd the chaynce before.”

  “No, leave Jimmy out of it, I’m talking to you.”

  “Then let me be here for you, because I want to. Be here for me.”

  They weren’t really arguing. The words were like an argument, but they didn’t mean one.

  “I can’t.”

  “Do it anyway. There are so many other things you can’t. You want a whole life full of can’ts? Maybe this is one you can. Come on, it’s harmless. Me too.” Edward seemed to consider smiling, but then didn’t want to risk it. He left the room instead, fumbling as he closed the door, and she knew he had gone to make up the bed where she would sleep.

  She sat in Edward’s living-room and listened to him scuffling softly in and out of other doors, opening drawers and bustling, moving inside a flat that was totally his. Everything here was built up and covered with years and years of Edward, uninterrupted by anyone else. He smelt of his flat, she realised, and his flat smelt of him and she was breathing easily, liking the taste of him in her lungs. She was coming up for Edward’s air and finding it familiar and still. This was a good, soft place. Her hands, clasping tight to each other, were lit by the slightly disturbing high and wide window that still held the sky she’d seen behind him in one of his photographs.

  At rest and with an emptying mind, she remembered how much she ached: because of the bruising and confusion and most of all with holding on, with clinging as hard as she could from the inside, so nothing of her personality could fall out of place. The concentration she had needed to force a way through the journey south had left her almost hypnotised with exhaustion. Sentences and images looped and repeated inside her skull, cut loose from any sense.

  Slowly, she stopped trying to look all right. Mr. Brindle had been careful as ever to leave her face unmarked, but if she really wept, the hurt would show and now she wanted it to. Mr. Brindle had made the pain, but it was hers and she could do what she wanted with it at any time.

  “Oh, don’t. You don’t need to. It’s fine now. Unless you want. It’s okay if you want.” She hadn’t heard Edward come in and couldn’t think clearly how long he’d been gone.

  Helen bleared up at him while he stumbled forward and patted at her. One of his hands was holding something. “I made toast.”

  For some reason this let waves of sobbing break up through her. She listened to herself. She wouldn’t stop.

  “Well, it’s all . . .” He clattered the plate down on the table and tried to lever his arms in about her. “Toast is all I make. Helen. Helen?” She knew he was beginning to lift her, but couldn’t help. For a moment he rocked her forward. “It’s all right. You know it’s all right.”

  They scrambled against each other, Edward making for the sofa until they hit it and fell. For a long time, Helen was aware of being against him, his pullover and solid ribs. She touched him from inside a fog of her own noise.

  Edward held her until she was quiet, until the sky in the window had bruised into an overcast night.

  “Helen. Helen? You’re not asleep?”

  “No.” She swallowed. Her throat was raw. “No, I’m here.”

  “Good. And I’m here, too. No.” She turned and met the quiet tension in his arms. “Don’t move. Just lie. I want to talk to you—it’s nothing bad.”

  He began to kiss across her forehead, sometimes brushing away her hair because that was a good thing to do. “I wanted to say,” he punctuated himself, “that you,” with regular, “are exceptionally beautiful,” tiny pressures of mouth, “and that you have,” and breath, “a beautiful brain. I was incapable of saying this properly before. Because I can be almost terminally inarticulate when it comes to people. You know how I am—I do get it right, but only eventually. I count myself lucky that you’re so patient.

  “And now I have a duty to say that, inside here, in your mind, there’s no limit to you. You are your own universe. Your own happiness. They could dye you with silver nitrate; you’d be your own photographic plate. A picture of the roots into your soul.” Edward paused, nuzzling her hair.

  “Networks. And webs. And branches. Layered. Woven. Spun out of need and hope and, um, love. Love.” The word caught at something in her blood. “You’re free, Helen. You’ve always been free. If God made your mind, then that is the way that He made you. Now you’re to stay here as long as you like. Nothing bad will happen, do you understand?”

  “Okay.”

  She knew that when she spoke, her words touched his throat, the open button at the collar of his shirt and his neck.

  “Whatever has, will . . . whatever happens, our mutual conditions are not at fault. That is to say, I can’t second-guess God, but if I’d made you, I would wish you to be completely yourself and not necessarily perfect.”

  Her eyes stung out of focus and she shook her head against him. “It’s all gone wrong.”

  “Oh, don’t say that. Please. Not when you’re here with me. This is the point where it starts to go right. Don’t try to stop it. We can be safe here and . . . we’ll have fun or something. Talk. You can have this. You don’t have to pay for it—no more than you already have. You’re not a bad person, Helen, not sinful. I don’t think we even understand sin—what we commit and don’t—we can’t judge. We just should collate our total information, be complete and act for the best. We’re for the best. We, meaning me and you. What do you say?”

  She said yes, because she felt yes.

  “Thank you, Helen.”

  “Why thank me?”

  “Because you came to me.” She tried again to sit up and this time he let her. “I mean thank you for knowing you’d be welcome. He grinned up at his ceiling and then down at her. “All the way to London with no guarantees . . . That Mrs. Brindle, she’s a determined woman and she does get what she wants.”

  Helen thought of what she wanted and Edward’s eyes stammered shut while his hands wrestled quietly with each other. “Aaaw, yagodda see, I wish a was a little bit bedder at making folks feel okay. No practice. James Stewart would do this better
.”

  “But he wouldn’t be the same as you.”

  Edward flushed mildly and began a contented frown. “Better luck next time.”

  “No thanks.”

  The cold toast was still on the coffee table, untouched. Edward stirred, “Well, I’m going to . . . If you would like to see your room. I don’t know . . . are you tired?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good. That is, you’ll sleep, which is good. Will you?”

  Helen nodded. Stood up and apart from him.

  The room he offered her was lined with shelves and heavily curtained and carpeted. The small sounds she made unpacking her night things; coming back from his orderly bathroom that smelt so remarkably of his skin; undressing for bed—every tiny impact and footfall was damped down, softened to silence. He had given her somewhere insulated where she couldn’t help but be at peace.

  Their first breakfast developed the easy shape it would always have while she was there.

  “Toast.” Edward pointed at the toast plate in case she found it unfamiliar and seemed to wonder if he read his newspaper next or talked.

  “It’s all you can make.”

  He let go the paper and smiled. “Well remembered.”

  “You only told me last night.”

  “Nice to be remembered, though. Toast is, in fact, not absolutely everything I can make. It’s nearly absolutely everything.”

  “Good. I can cook. But I don’t like to.”

  “Fine. That’s fine.” There was a tremor in his hand. He noticed and rested it under his chin. “Sleep?”

  “No thanks, I’ve just had one.”

  “Fine. Good.” He leaned his chair back recklessly. “Well, I’m going to do some work now, since I have time to do that again. If you—” Feeling himself unsteadied, he swung into the table again. “You should treat this as where you live, as home. Do what you want. Bearing in mind that I’ll take you out to eat. If you want to be taken . . . I won’t make you eat . . . that is, obviously you will eat . . . but not necessarily with me. It’s not a problem, um, evidently. In fact the only one confused here is me.” He sighed lightly and began again. “If you do want to go with me, to eat, then we can co-ordinate times and things; it would be more efficient that way.” He felt forward for the butter knife, something to distract him.

  “Why did you put me in that room?”

  Setting the knife back and numbly making sure that it was straight, “I know, I know. It is the spare room, it simply isn’t all that spare. It’s always been where I keep the stuff—everything’s in there. I do apologise.”

  “It’s like . . . a library . . .”

  “I know. It’s not good. You could stay in my study instead.” He examined the palm of his hand with sudden concern. “I should have mentioned . . . And now I have to say that I am making use of you—of your presence—because it keeps me out of there. Not that I go in there any more, in amongst the muck. I’m behaving.” He checked her eyes. “I am. But if you’re there, even if you’ve been there, it will make me feel safe. I slept safe last night.” He borrowed a glance at her, then blinked away. “But I should have asked your permission, I know.”

  “I slept safe, too.”

  “Oh. Well, good.”

  “How much is there?”

  “How much . . .?”

  “How much muck.”

  “Oh, as much as you could see. Four walls, from ceiling to floor: videos, magazines, books.” Edward seemed anxious to be comprehensive, keen to be humiliated with absolute accuracy. “There are some originals of The Oyster and The Pearl from when I was kidding myself this was all about art—bloody expensive stuff and no good, because Victorian tastes are not quite mine. Porn gets dated, like anything else. Which all helps me to side-step saying that I don’t exactly know how much. I counted the videos once; there are seven hundred of them, seven twenty, something like that, but that’s as far as I got. The act of cataloguing tends to become secondary. I start off alphabetical and then I go astray. I get too absorbed in my work.” He was trying to keep it light, but his eyes weren’t managing. “No self-control.”

  “You have control now.”

  “I try. Seeing it all offends you, doesn’t it? I mean, the titles are bad enough. I’m sorry.”

  “I was surprised, that’s all. It helps you if I’m in there?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t want to put you under pressure, but yes, it does.”

  “Well I might as well stay there, then. You’re the one who’d have the problem being in there. I don’t mind.”

  Edward twisted out a smile and rubbed his cheek.

  “But why haven’t you thrown it all away?”

  He spoke with the air of a man describing an incorrigible friend. “Will-power.” He rubbed his cheek again. “I decided I would test my will-power by keeping my temptations within reach. Otherwise they’re hardly a temptation, after all . . .” His eyes searched the air above her. “Obviously, if my will then fails me, I can get really disgraceful pretty much instantaneously.” Edward examined her expression almost surgically. “I know, I’m fooling no one, not even me. I know exactly what I’m like. I only ever assume the moral high ground to get a running start for my descent.”

  He huffed out a breath with something approaching relief, still bewildered by himself, but more content. “Positive action must be taken, I realise, I just can’t take it yet. I do live in hope, though—I’m back to nearly a month without a slip and some days I don’t even think of wanting it. Eventually, I’ll be able to chuck it away. And I’ll do the chucking, no one else.” His mouth tensed. “By then I might have worked out how on earth to dispose of it. I can hardly stack it all down at the bottom of the stairs and wait for the bin men to come. If that isn’t a slightly over-appropriate verb.”

  Edward began a stretch then faltered, stopped. She wanted to touch him a little and thought about how.

  “Oh, God.”

  “Edward? What?”

  “Oh, God. Helen. I didn’t—”

  Helen had pushed up her sleeves, as she often did. She had forgotten the scratches on her forearms, the random bruises, the finger-grip imprints. The marks were dark, ripe, full of blood.

  “What did he do?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not fucking all right. What did he do?”

  She really didn’t need him to be angry on her behalf, Helen was perfectly able to manage that herself, if she chose to; she was a determined woman, after all.

  “What did he do?”

  Edward was starting to frighten her and she couldn’t allow him to. He was starting to shout.

  “He found one of your postcards.” She didn’t say that to blame Edward, only to make him be quiet and just let her forget it again. “That’s what he did. He found your card.”

  “Oh, Hele—”

  “You’d have watched it, wouldn’t you? If I’d been a video, you’d have watched.”

  Edward almost reached for her, but then let his arm withdraw. He closed both hands over his head and said nothing.

  A person who is scared and angry often strikes out inappropriately. Helen wished that she didn’t conform so perfectly to type.

  They were civil to each other after that, but they didn’t exactly speak. Edward shut himself into his study for most of the day and she dozed, watched children’s television and found it stupidly moving, then dozed again.

  “Hello.” Edward knocked at his own living-room door.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Well. I don’t feel comfortable. I don’t know what I should do.”

  “Yeah.” Maybe she should go. A sinking greyness in her limbs made her think she should go. But there was nowhere that would have her, or nowhere she could have.

  “Do you . . . should you see a doctor?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “It’s happened before, I never went
to the doctor then.”

  She heard Edward snap in a breath and force it out again.

  “You’re right about me. I will watch anything. You’re quite right. But I do have to know it’s not real. Jesus—real people frighten me. And if it was real pain . . . Helen, I grew up with that. My mother, I saw what Dad did to her. Or if I didn’t, I heard it, I saw the marks. It was my fault then and it’s mine again now. I was stupid to write to you.”

  “I didn’t tell you not to. I didn’t want to tell you not to. You didn’t do this; you weren’t there.” There was an uneasy pause that she wished she could leave unbroken. She couldn’t. “You were stupid to write to me?”

  “The way that I did.” He moved to stand beside her chair, very still. “I had to write, but I shouldn’t have done it that way.”

  “Don’t let him make me angry with you. I don’t want to be. You haven’t done anything wrong.” She leaned until her head could touch his arm. He let her be close, but didn’t move closer. “Do you think we’ll work, Edward. Do you think I can be here?”

  “You need somewhere to stay and I need you with me.”

  He rubbed at her ear with his thumb and forefinger and she heard the shingly, seaside rush of sound close beside her eardrum. When she was a girl, she’d loved that noise. It was private, something no one else could ever listen to. For a moment he squeezed slightly and she caught the thrum of his blood, or her own.

  “Helen, my work keeps me busy, but it’s lonely when I stop. Especially now, when there’s nothing else here. I would need you, even if I didn’t . . . You know. If I didn’t feel for you.”

  “Will we work, though?”

  “I don’t know.” He tried that again, to make it seem hopeful. “I don’t know. That’s not something I’m professor of. But I think we’d be good.” This time, he’d sounded mainly sad, so she kissed his hand.

  At first, Helen worried, imagining how they might be and what they might have to do to each other if they didn’t take care, but the slow days they made together left her nothing but settled and calm.