‘I said that I can’t come tomorrow,’ she said. ‘It’s Saturday.’ ‘So what’s wrong with Saturday?’ Noah said. ‘You always practise abstinence on Saturday?’
‘Camilla is at home on Saturday,’ Ali said. ‘I can’t leave my daughter to watch the television half the morning while I totter down the road to my fancy man’s bed. I could come again this evening. She has her piano lesson this evening. I could place my body at your disposal for one hour.’
Noah reentered the bedroom where he rested a hand upon his desk which stood alongside the bed. Upon it was a small, portable electric typewriter – the first Ali had seen – and an old wire-backed typing manual, sent on by Noah’s mother and open at lesson one. Noah, oddly enough, had never learned to type and was now, undaunted in his fiftieth year, attempting to make good this lack, but it did not come to him easily. He raised his eyes from the manual to enjoy the wholeness of Ali’s nudity. Then, taking up a narrow belt from her jeans on the floor, he fastened it around her waist. It pleased him to watch the small brass buckle lie coldly across her warm umbilicus.
‘Making love twice in one day is for younger men than I am,’ he said, but entirely without apology. ‘Come tomorrow. Send Camilla out with a girl friend on a shopping trip. They can spend the morning checking out boutiques. That’s what girls like to do, isn’t it?’
‘What boutiques?’ Ali said. ‘You’re not in Manhattan you know. Anyway, Camilla hasn’t really got girl friends. She prefers to spend her spare time with me.’
‘I see,’ Noah said, with dearly contrived restraint. ‘In that case we won’t discuss it.’ He bent and kissed her cheek. ‘I’m off. You’re a great lady, Al. Lock up when you leave and return me the keys at the unit. You’ll come by the hospital lunchtime, right?’
‘Yes,’ Ali said, because it had been very pleasant these last days to eat a late lunch with him in the canteen on her way back from her cleaning job. Yesterday it had fortified her against the unavoidable encounter with Virginia Woolf whose Blutack had been reactivated. But it made her smile to think of his keys; that in this life there were those like Noah who held with constant and rigorous locking and those, like herself, who used locks only intermittently and then usually to lock themselves out in error.
‘You carry more keys than a jailer,’ she said gaily, because her gaiety was fast returning to her, perhaps as a foil to his sobriety. ‘My God, I have gone to bed for three consecutive days with a hard-core lock zealot. What’s more, you’re a medic, Noah. I don’t care at all for medical persons as a category. I have to tell you that.’
Noah shrugged and looked quite pleased. ‘I guess that way I don’t get to share you with my colleagues,’ he said. ‘You have no other complaints against me, I trust?’
‘There is a great deal I could hold against you,’ Ali said, for no other reason, really, than to delay him a little. ‘There is your house for a start. You live in a house that looks as if Habitat Contract International flew in and set it up for you within twenty minutes. Houses ought to grow, Noah. I fear that no love has gone into your set-up here. Have you always lived like this?’ But Noah was not responsive to questions about his history. He found them irrelevant.
‘So tomorrow I’ll stay home and weave rugs and drapes for you,’ he said. Ali laughed to think of it.
‘And by your own confession you have just had those shoes handmade for you by Duckers of the Turl.’ She pointed accusingly to his feet. ‘I consider that an unforgiveable extravagance even for a man with unusually high insteps. You wear ugly shirts. Furthermore, you pilfer soap from the National Health Service.’
‘Pilfer soap? Noah said. ‘If you call that pilfering, baby, it’s because you never lived through the war.’
‘I did in a peripheral sort of way,’ Ali said. ‘I remember my mother wrapping food parcels in Irish linen for what she called “the Eastern Sector”. You had to oversew the edges with buttonhole thread and write the addresses in marking ink. I don’t know what happened about the stamps. I was too young to know about stamps. Perhaps you fixed them on with blanket stitching? I suppose the postmen in East Berlin ate well at any rate. Or their masters did.’
‘Sure,’ Noah said, whose own somewhat remote European relations had not needed food parcels since they had early on in the war been herded into synagogues and burned to death, while Ali’s mother’s relations had had the better fortune to end up in meagre tenement houses, nursing pre-war memories of stables, cooks and holiday houses in the Rhineland.
‘We’ll let the soap pass,’ she said. ‘But you perform experiments on live animals which is a thing I always sign petitions against in the local organic food shop.’
‘Bring up your knees a moment would you?’ Noah said suddenly. Ali drew up her knees. ‘Just let your thighs fall open,’ he said. ‘I’d like to check your IUD.’
Ali continued to talk with splayed legs. ‘So you see there is little to recommend you but that you steal soap and that you can’t type. You are the only American I have ever met who can’t type, by the way. I grant that you’re dead good at feeling up women but that is to do with your great age and experience. Did you say you were fifty?’
‘When did you last get this thing checked?’ Noah said.
‘Checked?’ Ali said. ‘What do you mean checked? I had it fitted didn’t I? About two years ago some miserable sadist medic at the Family Planning Clinic jammed a speculum up me and shoved the thing in. It hurt like hell. A woman doctor she was, but women doctors are often even bossier than the men. They’re collaborators really, aren’t they? They behave like the men only more so. This particular one said that since the NHS was doing me such a favour and providing the thing, could I please try not to look so much like a “dying duck in a thunderstorm” during the insertion. Say, oughtn’t you to go to work, Noah? This is no time for the laying on of hands.’
‘The device is not in position,’ Noah said, employing his usual deadpan manner.
Ali stiffened and drew in her breath.
‘Most probably you ejected it almost immediately if the insertion was unusually uncomfortable,’ he said. ‘I guess you flushed it down the toilet without noticing. It’s easily done.’
‘Are you serious?’ Ali said. He was already back at the hand basin, laundering his hands with quite unnecessary vigour.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget that your system has a powerful capacity for rejecting foreign bodies. D’you ever get any abdominal discomfort?’
Ali brushed aside the question. ‘You’re saying I’m pregnant,’ she said.
‘Not necessarily,’ Noah said. ‘Just tell me what’s with your menstrual cycle. Like when do you expect your period?’ Ali searched her mind for landmarks to assist recall but it was not a thing of which she had recently had much cause to take note.
‘It’ll come back to me,’ she said after a pause, more with hope than with conviction. ‘I’m sorry, Noah, but I don’t keep records.’
‘Oh for Chrissake,’ Noah said impatiently. ‘Come on, Al. When?’
‘Being sexually inactive, I had no need to remember it till now,’ Ali said. ‘I mean there are people in the world who don’t know when they were born. The point is that people only remember what it’s necessary to remember. Anyway, I thought I had a coil. Now you tell me I’ve flushed it down the loo.’
‘If you’re lucky,’ Noah said, sniping nastily, though his own peasant grandmother had not known her date of birth.
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ Ali said.
‘The device could be in your uterus,’ Noah said, rising to the subject. ‘It could be Christ knows where. How the hell should I know if you don’t? It’s your body, Al, not mine. Why don’t you take proper care of it?’
‘You’re saying I could have a baby with bits of copper entangled in its brain,’ Ali said, morbidly.
‘Listen, Al,’ Noah said, ‘whatever you have or haven’t got in there, it ain’t no baby. Not after three days. Not unless you also sign petitions
in support of foetal rights in that lentil-bread and seaweed cookie store of yours.’
‘I don’t, actually,’ Ali said trying hard by now to fight back tears. ‘It may surprise you but that isn’t one of my causes. Neither is astrology, nor do I shake my tambourine for the Hare Krishnas. I don’t even have a dog called The Hobbit. In short, I’m no bloody fool because I don’t tick the way you do.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Noah said, feeling justly rebuked; feeling suddenly for her battered, female self-esteem; feeling her violation at the hands of a half-baked technology which in truth he despised as much as she did and somehow had not said so, but had leaped instead into the classic response and blamed its victim; feeling profoundly that to watch Ali nursing a child would be a better thing than to be setting up abdominal X-rays for her, and pregnancy tests. He sat down on the bed.
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘You flushed it down the toilet, don’t worry. It happens all the time.’
Ali’s mind made a felicitous connection. ‘I’m not pregnant,’ she said abruptly. He noticed that she wiped her nose peremptorily on his adjacent pyjama sleeve, but he let it pass. ‘I remember now, because I had the gruelling job of finding Kotex pads for Camilla on the August Bank Holiday. She won’t use my Tampax, you see.’
‘Hold it, Al,’ Noah said. He allowed to escape the merest hint of impatience in the expiration of his breath. ‘Where does Camilla come into this?’
‘Well, she comes in because we always bleed together,’ Ali said. ‘Always. To the day. I’m sorry Noah. I do see that menstrual telepathy isn’t up your street, but there you have it. My period is due any day now. I reckon we’re all right.’ Noah picked up his jacket with considerable relief.
‘You’re crazy, Al,’ he said, with infinite pleasure. ‘Do you know that? I love a crazy woman. God knows why I love you.’
‘It does seem a little odd to me,’ Ali said. ‘Not to say precipitous. I mean, after four days, Noah. For a rational man like you.’
‘Call your doctor,’ Noah said sharply in reply. ‘Call him now while I’m watching. Tell him I want you properly checked out for any abdominal tenderness. Tell him I want an X-ray.’ Ali started to laugh but tried to suppress it. ‘And while you’re on to him,’ Noah said, ‘tell him I want those lesions on your hand checked out. What the hell’s so funny?’
‘Nothing,’ Ali said, thinking how he had just said it was her body wasn’t it, not his. ‘What are lesions? If you mean these geriatric blotches, they probably go away if you chew raw meat in a graveyard at full moon. Are you saying I’ve got leprosy?’
Noah picked up the telephone, planted it squarely before her and handed her the receiver.
‘Call your doctor,’ he said. He was not a person to procrastinate in the face of a necessary telephone call. He was not an accumulator of in-tray material, or of unpaid bills; not a hoarder of uncollected dry-cleaning tickets. Even in her preoccupied condition, Ali appreciated this as a great gift and a rare one. By the grace of God, this kind, thirteen-stone competent person had fallen in love with her because she had smiled at him over a candle-stub in a restaurant and had struck thereby at something deeper than culture and reason.
‘You talk to him Noah,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen my GP in donkey’s years. Go on. You’d be better at it. Just explain to him that you want the entire product overhauled and he’ll do it. He’ll listen to you. If I tell him he’ll pass the buck to the Family Planning Clinic and I’ll get the female sadist all over again. Anyway, what can I tell him? “My man friend says I’ve got leprosy and a fucked-up crotch”?’
‘You’ll cope,’ Noah said. ‘There’s no way you’ll act as dumb as you try to make out. I’ll see you lunchtime, Al. Like one-thirty. Don’t be late.’ And, with that, he promptly left the house.
It was with the intention of telephoning Noah that Ali approached the public telephone box. She was on her way back from work. Having gone at once to her doctor’s surgery and only then to her bachelor’s establishment, she was running late; too late to lunch with Noah. A person was hovering near the box and was peering in rather haughtily, through either impatience or curiosity. Inside the box, slumped on the floor, was Ali’s next-door neighbour.
‘Drunk, I reckon,’ said the observer, with a shrug.
‘Or dead!’ Ali said in outrage. She wrenched open the door. There was no smell of alcohol from within. Only the familiar, poignant odour of dry rot and wet dog which hangs about the clothing of the aged, dog-loving poor.
‘Can you hear me?’ Ali said, crouching. The neighbour half opened a glaucous blue eye and closed it again. There were small traces of recent vomit on her coat lapels. ‘I’ll call an ambulance,’ Ali said. The mention of an ambulance induced a sudden desperate animation in the neighbour, who struggled to her knees, clawing at Ali’s shins, and stumbling slightly, as she did so, in the hem of her own coat.
‘Get me a taxi,’ she said sharply. ‘Never an ambulance.’ Ali hesitated. ‘Go on,’ she snapped.
‘A taxi,’ Ali said. She rifled the Yellow Pages with a shaking hand, then dialled and spoke her needs.
‘Give me a bunk up, would you?’ said the neighbour. The deed accomplished, they struggled to a nearby bus stop and sat down.
‘I get these turns,’ she said, by way of explanation, ‘but sometimes they can take me unawares. I always go prepared. I always carry plastic bags for vomit.’ (’plaastic’, she said. The giveaway vestige of a one-time private school gentility.) ‘People think you’re drunk. Can I bum a cigarette off you for now?’
‘Of course,’ Ali said. She groped hastily in her bag and – holding two cigarettes between her teeth – lit up with difficulty in the slight wind.
‘It’s bloody old age,’ said the neighbour. ‘It’s an obscenity. Plaastic bags for urine; plaastic bags for vomit. Be warned. There’s nothing prepares you for this bloody decrepitude. You live in fear of losing your teeth down a drain. I’m buggered if I’ll let some bloody rat have my teeth. I’ve kept my turns under control for two years, now. I watch what I eat, you see. Raw egg-white,’ she said as though passing on a coveted, secret recipe. ‘Raw egg-white and cream crackers. That’s what my stomach holds down.’
‘And nicotine,’ Ali said pensively. The neighbour produced an unexpected, high-spirited cackle.
‘And tea,’ she said. ‘You could say I was a vegetarian couldn’t you? Tannin and nicotine. God, but I don’t half crave a bloody steak sometimes, don’t you?’ She had evidently been to the public library and was now shaking cigarette ash liberally into her large-print edition of GBS which lay in her shopping bag alongside an economy-size bag of bone-shaped dog biscuits. ‘You can even get nostalgic for the gristle, so long as you’ve got your teeth. Never call me an ambulance,’ she said, reverting to a former theme. ‘When they get you in hospital at my age, you see, they don’t bloody let you out. Then it’s nothing but nurses wheeling you to the bloody lavatory along with all the other grumbling old hags till you join the coffin queue. Once a year at Christmas you get “Knees Up Mother Brown” and that’s your lot till you get your bloody shroud. Paper shrouds for paupers, eh? I’d sooner be boiled up in a pot and fed to the dogs.’
‘Yes,’ Ali said. ‘I do see your point.’
In the taxi and at the neighbour’s prompting, they smoked one more cigarette apiece.
‘My name’s Margaret,’ she said. ‘You’re the girl next door.’
‘Yes,’ Ali said, colouring slightly at the memory of the emperor’s whore.
‘You’ve got a new boyfriend,’ Margaret said, as though reading Ali’s thoughts. ‘Hope he’s an improvement on the last one, but I doubt it. I never understood men. Only dogs. All that bloody male ego. All that conceit. I never had the time for it. Nor for sex either. Never came to terms with it.’ The taxi driver, young, handsome, brown-skinned and sleekly moustached, engaged in a brief spasm like a noiseless cough and glanced furtively sideways as if to commune with a miscellany of hard porn concealed within the glove compar
tment. ‘I accept the sex in the dogs, of course,’ she said, ‘but for myself I find it galling to remember that I’m here on earth as a result of it.’ She tapped the driver sharply on the shoulder. ‘Are you a Muslim?’ she asked, pronouncing the word as though it were a bad taste on the tongue.
‘Come again?’ said the driver, but she turned again to Ali. ‘They have no place for spinsters in their religion, you see,’ she said with haughty disdain. ‘Their women are all either wives, concubines or mothers. It’s the same in all these bloody tinpot religions.’ She described a tremulous semi-circle with her arm, to denote a regrettably infinite variety of blind heathen. ‘Jews too. They can’t sit next to a woman on the bus, you know, in case she’s having her monthlies.’
A hint of colour had returned to the neighbour’s gravel-textured cheek, as though the subject of men had excited her somehow, in spite of her protests. At the door of the house, where she strenuously insisted upon paying, the neighbour drew her week’s pension money carefully from a plastic wallet giving off stray dog hairs, counted out the fare with arthritic hands and pointedly denied the driver his tip. Whether she did so on grounds of race, sex, creed or simple frugality, Ali was not to discover.
In the neighbour’s kitchen where she made a pot of tea, Ali encountered a poverty and decrepitude beyond her own imaginings. It hung in the blackened cobwebs which wrapped the ceiling in oily swathes. It hung in the hot-water cylinder, rusted now into uselessness, and in the green tarnish upon the nickel-plated teaspoons. Dogs scratched at food and scraps which lurked in the patches of exposed hessian backing the ancient linoleum on the kitchen floor. A small sprouting of mushrooms was visible under the enamelled cabriole forelegs of the gas cooker where Ali boiled the water. The upper floors were a storm of plastic dustbin bags spilling a lifetime’s collection of jumble-sale clothing and bric-à-brac, among which purple nylon cardigans appeared to predominate. A faded Christmas wreath and a somewhat moth-eaten velour-covered plastic bulldog adorned the mantelpiece, flanking an old West-clox alarm, now ticking its way stridently towards two-thirty. A number of small dogs twitched in dreams, or gnawed at their own balding elbow joints. Naked live wires flirted with each other in the worn electric flexes which trailed in hair-raising profusion across the floor to the only electric power socket. On the window ledge, old Margaret was growing carrot-top trees in saucers.
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