by Stephen May
‘Sleeping,’ she says.
‘I know honey. Sorry we woke you.’ And Sarah goes to the bed and does some vital cover straightening.
‘Sleeping,’ Scarlett says again, louder this time. And we know a dismissal when we hear one, and we back out apologetically, as though from the throne room of some capricious queen renowned for her beheading parties. We switch the light off, half close the door and stand outside listening. All we can hear now is her breathing. Deep, slow, confident breaths.
I don’t know how long we stand there for, but it’s a while anyway. And then we’re kissing. I don’t know who initiates it, but somehow our hands find each other and then lips and then mouths and it’s not quite like we’ve just met. Not quite like the very first time. It’s much, much better than that, but there’s some of that same urgency. When we surface, she pulls my hair.
‘One day, when we can, we’re getting rid of this.’
‘Oh, why?’
‘It unnerves me. Makes you look all rock starry. A bit too beautiful. I’ll put up with it for now though.’
She touches my face. Runs her palm over my cheeks, my nose, my lips. It’s like she’s assuring herself I’m real. That I’m really here. That I’m not already a ghost.
She slips the bobby dazzler jacket off, unbuttons my waistcoat and my shirt. Runs her hands over my chest and down over the new six-pack.
‘Now this – this you can keep.’
And her hands are on the belt of my bobby-dazzler trousers.
‘Time for bed, Mrs Fisher. Mrs Knox. Mrs Fisher-Knox,’ I say.
‘I think I’ll keep my own name, thank you very much.’
‘Time for bed, whoever you are.’
She has dealt with the belt, and now her hand is unbuttoning the fly of the suit.
I can imagine Jimmy’s pain if he knew that in seconds this suit is going to lie crumpled and discarded on the floor of an RV.
And we begin to do all the things we’ve learned to do with each other. The things we can all learn, rich and poor, old and young, beautiful or not. The things we should have done in the back of that limo when we had the chance. We touch and stroke and kiss and whisper filthy instructions in the warm dark. We are dancing and wrestling and calling out in a fierce strange tongue that no one speaks. That everyone speaks. And yes, if you could see us or hear us it would be ridiculous. Laughable. We storm, we form, we norm. We reach all our short-term objectives.
And you’d envy us. You wouldn’t be able to tear your eyes away.
But no one can see us.
And here tonight there are no wars or murders. No babies crying for milk or for their mothers. No poisons swimming patiently through the blood to the heart. There is only this. And for now it’s enough. And it didn’t take ten thousand hours to get good at this. Afterwards there is toast and we get crumbs in the bed as I start to tell my love about my new plan. About Knoxville. My dream city. What it could be like, the colour of the postboxes, the perfect houses. The parks. The pubs. The easy-going, child-friendly cafes where the poets cry over girls and the young philosophers punch each other. The wide open spaces to fly kites.
She’s up for it. Pretty soon she’s joining in. She talks about the schools we’ll build where the only compulsory subjects are art, music, drama, dance and languages. Where the kids elect the faculty. She talks about the retirement homes the seniors queue to join. Where the care assistants have PhDs. Where they have to pass exams in kindness. Reach proper established benchmarks in love.
And I talk about the sports stadium. The field-hockey squads, the rugby team. The cricket pavilion. The beach-volleyball centre, because Knoxville will be by the sea. Of course it will. Who wouldn’t live by the sea if they could? I talk about the fact we’ll only need the Knoxville police to teach cycling proficiency. There’ll be no proper crime, we won’t allow it.
‘What do you think?’ I say.
‘You know what I think, Nicky. I think yes. Yes to all of it. Yes, yes, yes. Knoxville. Absolutely. Knoxville. Perfect. We can be the punk-rock town planners.’ And she laughs and wraps her gluey self around me. ‘But now my dearest love, my own Pog, please, please, please let me get some fucking sleep.’
And she’s off in seconds while I listen to the gentle music of her breath and pulse, remembering her dancing in the kitchen to Jefferson Starship that day a few short weeks ago – a million years ago – thinking about the world our daughter will grow up in, and if anything should keep me awake, that should. But it doesn’t because now I have this new dream to keep me going. To take my mind off death and poisoned darts. Toxins and taxes.
Next thing I know there’s a small child telling me to carpe diem. Telling me this through the powerful modern medium of bouncing on my head.
‘Daddy.’ Bounce. ‘Wake up. Daddy.’ Bounce. ‘Wake up.’
‘I am awake.’
‘Daddy.’ Bounce. ‘Wake up. Daddy.’ Bounce. ‘Be happy.’
‘I am happy.’
And I am. Kind of.
And then she says, ‘Mary. Want Mary.’
‘Mary’s gone,’ I say. And wait. Scarlett opens her mouth, fills her lungs. I raise an eyebrow. Scarlett stops and thinks hard and very visibly about the advisability of yelling. I see a resigned look pass over her face. An oh-well-it-was-worth-a-shot kind of look and I suddenly remember this game my father used to play with me when I was small. It might distract her.
‘Hey, let’s play bucking bronco,’ I say. She gives me a puzzled frown. In my best cowboy voice, my Woody from Toy Story voice, I go, ‘Well, howdy there, pardner, what’s your name?’
Scarlett just looks at me with those serious eyes. There is no one as serious as a child in a game. I say it all again. Exact same words, exact same intonation, like I was some kind of fairground ride, just programmed with a few short sentences. ‘Well, howdy there, pardner, what’s your name?’
And her eyes are wide as she whispers, ‘Scarlett. My name is Scarlett,’ and my eyes are hot and wet – sometime I might get used to her speaking, but not yet.
I keep my voice bright and metallic and machine-like. ‘Scarlett. That’s a purty name. Let’s play bucking bronco!’ And holding her round her waist I buck and thrash and generally act like I’m a horse trying to throw her off; she grips my ribs hard with her knees. It is actually quite hard to tip her over, maybe she’d be good with real horses. Maybe that could be her thing.
After a minute or so this rodeo horse tips her to the side, holding her firmly as she crashes next to me on the bed.
‘Again!’ she says. ‘Again!’
‘Well, howdy there, pardner,’ I say again as I lift her back into position on my stomach. She weighs almost nothing at all. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Scarlett,’ she says, more firmly this time. ‘My name is Scarlett. And I am awesome.’
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my editor Helen Garnons-Williams for her usual patience, good humour, sound judgement and unshakeable tolerance. Thanks also to the rest of the team at Bloomsbury especially Oliver Holden-Rea, Jude Drake, Amanda Shipp, Xa Shaw-Stewart, Ianthe Willmott-Cox, Holly Fordham, Alice Shortland, Trâm-Anh Doan and Elizabeth Woabank, as well as Lea Beresford in the USA.
Thanks to the famously hawk-eyed Gabriella Nemeth for sensible and sensitive copy-editing.
For having the grown-up conversations I’m not equipped to have, I’d like to thank my agent David Smith at Annette Green Agency.
This book also owes something to the inspirational life of my old Colchester housemate Nick Crawshaw 1963–2005.
I’d like to thank Lucy Conroy – Lucy And The Caterpillar – for allowing me to quote from her song ‘Bumble Bee’.
Also owed thanks are Arts Council England, Joe Compton, Jacqui Corcoran, Jan and Tony Cropper, Jodie Daber, Ralph Dartford, Joanna Dennis, Lizzie Enfield, Jim English, Denise Fahmy, Emma Forster, Sadie Hassell, Mark Illis, Duncan May, Herbie May, Carole Ockelford, Hannah Procter, Anthony Roberts, Ruth Scobie, Jim Tough and Richard
Whiteley who all contributed to this book. Usually without knowing it.
All these thanks are heartfelt but the most heartfelt of all go, as ever, to Caron who has to live with these characters (and me) through their most turbulent, most dangerous, most annoyingly formative times.
A Note on the Author
Stephen May’s first novel, Tag, won the Reader’s Choice Award at the 2009 Welsh Book of the Year. His second, Life! Death! Prizes!, was published by Bloomsbury in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award, and the Guardian’s ‘Not the Booker Prize’. Originally from Bedford, Stephen now lives and works in West Yorkshire.
www.sdmay.com
@RealStephenMay
By the Same Author
Life! Death! Prizes!
Tag
Copyright © 2014 by Stephen May
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eISBN: 978-1-62040-350-1
First published in the United States in 2014
This electronic edition published in December 2014
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