In Between the Sheets

by Ian Mcewan

  He was not shouting words. With each pulse of the drum he gave out a deep loud growl. He was watching something closely in the crowd and Henry, following his eyeline, saw a large rusty tin passing from hand to hand and heard the clink of coins. Then he saw in the crowd a dull flash of reflected sunlight. It was a long sword, slightly curved with an ornamental handle. The crowd reached out to hold it, touch it, assure themselves of its substantiality. It moved in countermotion to the biscuit tin. Marie tugged at Henry’s ear and demanded explanations. He pushed deeper towards the circle till they were second from the front. The tin came close. Henry felt the man’s fierce red eyes on him and threw in three small coins. The man beat the drum and roared and the tin passed on.

  Marie shivered on Henry’s shoulders, and he stroked her bare knees for comfort. Suddenly the man broke into words, a crude chant on two notes. His words were ponderous and slurred. Henry made them out, and at the same time saw the girl for the first time. “Without blood … without blood … without blood …” She was standing far to one side, a girl of about sixteen, naked from the waist up and barefoot. She stood perfectly still, hands at her sides, feet together, staring at the ground a few feet in front of her. Her hair too was red, but fine and cropped short. Around her waist she wore a piece of sacking. She was so pale it was quite possible to believe that she was without blood.

  Now the drum took on a steady, arterial pulse and the sword was returned to the man. He held it high above his head and glowered at the crowd. Someone from the crowd brought him the biscuit tin. He peered inside and shook his great head. The tin was returned to the crowd and the drumbeat accelerated. “Without blood,” the man shouted. “Through her belly, out her back, without blood.” The tin appeared in his hands again, and again he refused it. The crowd was desperate. Those at the back pushed forward to throw in money, those who had given shouted at those who had not. Quarrels broke out, but the tin was filling. When it returned the third time it was accepted and the crowd sighed with relief. The drumbeat ceased.

  By a movement of his head the man ordered the girl, surely his daughter, into the center of the circle. She stood with the oil drum between her and her father. Henry saw her legs shaking. The crowd was silent, anxious to miss nothing. The cries of vendors reached them across the plain as though from another world. Marie shouted out suddenly, her voice thin with fear, “What’s she going to do?” Henry shushed her, the man was putting the sword into his daughter’s hands. He did not take his eyes off her and she seemed powerless to look anywhere but into his face. He hissed something in her ear and she raised the point of the sword to her belly. Her father bent down and emptied the biscuit tin into a leather bag which he slung across his shoulder. The sword shook in the girl’s hands and the crowd stirred impatiently.

  Henry felt sudden warmth spread across his neck and down his back. Marie had urinated. He lifted her to the ground and at that moment, urged on by her father, the girl pushed the tip of the sword half an inch into her belly. Marie screamed with rage. She beat her fists against Henry’s legs. “Lift me up,” she sobbed. A small coin of crimson, brilliant in the sunlight, spread outwards around the shaft of the sword. Someone in the crowd sneered, “Without blood.” The father secured the leather bag beneath his toga. He made towards the sword as if to plunge it through his daughter. She collapsed at his feet and the sword clattered onto the pavement. The gigantic man picked it up and shook it at the angry crowd. “Pigs,” he shouted. “Greedy pigs.” The crowd was enraged and shouted back. “Cheat … murderer … he’s got our money…”

  But they were afraid, for when he pulled his daughter to her feet and dragged her off they scattered to make a path for him. He swung the sword about his head. “Pigs,” he kept on shouting. “Get back, you pigs.” A stone was thrown hard and caught him high on the shoulder. He spun around, dropped his daughter and went for the crowd like a madman, sweeping the sword in huge vicious arcs. Henry picked up Marie and ran with the rest of them. When he turned back to look the man was far away, urging his daughter along. The crowd had left him alone with his money. Henry and Marie walked back and found the pushchair on its side. One of the handles was bent.

  That evening, on the long walk home, Marie sat quietly and asked no questions. Henry felt anxious for her, but he was too tired to be of use. After the first mile she was asleep. He crossed the river by Vauxhall bridge and stopped halfway across, this time for himself. The Thames was lower than he had ever seen it. Some said that one day the river would dry up and giant bridges would uselessly span fresh meadows. He remained on the bridge ten minutes smoking a cigarette. It was difficult to know what to believe. Many said that tap water was slow poison.

  At home he lit all the candles in the house to dispel Marie’s fears. She followed him about closely. He cooked a fish on the paraffin stove and they ate in the bedroom. He talked to Marie about the sea which she had never seen and later he read her a story and she fell asleep on his lap. She woke as he was carrying her to her bed and said, “What did that lady do with her sword?”

  Henry said, “She danced. She danced with it in her hands.” Marie’s clear blue eyes looked deeply into his own. He sensed her disbelief and regretted his lie.

  He worked late into the night. Towards two o’clock he went to the window in his bedroom and opened it. The moon had sunk and clouds had moved in and covered the stars. He heard a pack of dogs down by the river. To the north he could see the fires burning on the Ministry plain. He wondered if things would change much in his lifetime. Behind him Marie called out in her sleep and laughed.

  Sunday

  I left Marie with a neighbor and walked northwards across London—a distance of six miles—to a reunion with an old lover. We knew each other from the old times, and it was in their memory rather than for passion that we continued to meet occasionally. On this day our lovemaking was long and poignantly unsuccessful. After, in a room of dusty sunshine and torn plastic furniture, we spoke of the old times. In a low voice Diane complained of emptiness and foreboding. She wondered which government and which set of illusions were to blame and how it could have been otherwise. Politically Diane was more sophisticated than I was. “We’ll see what happens,” I said. “But now roll onto your belly.” She told me about her new job, helping an old man with his fish. He was a friend of her uncle’s. Each day at dawn she was down at the river to meet his rowboat. They loaded a handcart with fish and eels and pushed it to a small street market where the old man had a stall. He went home to sleep and prepare for the night’s work, she sold his fish. In the early evening she took the money to his house and perhaps because she was pretty, he insisted they divide the takings evenly. While she spoke I massaged her neck and back. “Now everything smells of fish,” she cried. I had taken it for the lingering genital smell of another lover—she had many—but I did not say. Her fears and complaints were no different from mine, and yet—or rather, consequently—I said only bland, comfortless things. I worked my thumbs into the thick folds of skin in the small of her back. She sighed. I said, “It’s a job at least.”

  I rose from the bed. In the bathroom I gazed into an ancient-looking mirror. My bag of skin lay against the cool rim of the sink. Orgasm, however desultory, brought on the illusion of clarity. The unvarying buzz of an insect sustained my inaction. Making a guess at my silence Diane called out, “How’s your little girl?”

  “All right, coming on,” I said. However, I was thinking of my birthday, thirty in ten days’ time, and that in turn brought to mind my mother. I stooped to wash. Two years ago there had reached me, through a friend, a letter written on a coarse sheet of pink paper folded tightly and sealed inside a used envelope. My mother named a village in Kent. She was working in the fields, she had milk, cheese, butter and a little meat from the farm. She sent wistful love to her son and grandchild. Since then, in moments of charity or restlessness—I could not tell—I had made and retracted plans to leave the city with Marie. I calculated the village to be a week’s walk aw
ay. But each time I made excuses, I forgot my plans. I forgot even the recurrence of my plans and each occasion was freshly determined. Fresh milk, eggs, cheese … occasional meat. And yet more than the destination, it was the journey itself which excited me. With an odd sense of making my first preparations I washed my feet in the sink.

  I returned to the bedroom transformed—as was usual when I made these plans—and was faintly impatient to find it unchanged. Diane’s clothes and mine littered the furniture, dust and sunshine and objects packed the room. Diane had not moved since I left the room. She lay on her back on the bed, legs apart, right knee a little crooked, hand resting on her belly, mouth slack with a buried complaint. We failed to please each other, but we did talk. We were sentimentalists. She smiled and said, “What was that you were singing?” When I told her of my plans, she said, “But I thought you were going to wait until Marie was older.” I remembered that now as merely an excuse for delay. “She is older,” I insisted.

  By Diane’s bed there stood a low table with a thick glass top within which there was trapped a still cloud of delicate black smoke. On the table there was a telephone, its wire severed at four inches, and beyond that, propped against the wall, a cathode ray tube. The wooden casing, the glass screen and control buttons had long ago been ripped away and now bunches of bright wire curled about the dull metal. There were innumerable breakable objects—vases, ashtrays, glass bowls, Victorian or what Diane called Art Deco. I was never certain of the difference. We all scavenge for serviceable items, but like many others in her minimally privileged part of the city, Diane amassed items without function. She believed in interior decor, in style. We argued about these objects, once even bitterly. “We no longer craft things,” she had said. “Nor do we manufacture or mass-produce them. We make nothing, and I like things that are made, by craftsmen or by processes” (she had indicated the telephone), “it doesn’t matter, because they’re still the products of human inventiveness and design. And not caring for objects is one step away from not caring for people.”

  I had said, “Collecting these things and setting them out like this amounts to self-love. Without a telephone system telephones are worthless junk.” Diane was eight years older than I. She had insisted that you cannot love other people or accept their love for you unless you love yourself. I thought that was trite, and the discussion ended in silence.

  It was growing colder. We got between the sheets, me with my plans and clean feet, she with her fish. “The point is,” I said referring to Marie’s age, “that you cannot survive now without a plan.” I lay with my head on Diane’s arm and she drew me towards her breast. “I know someone,” she began, and I knew she was introducing a lover, “who wants to start a radio station. He doesn’t know how to generate electricity. He doesn’t know anyone who could build a transmitter or repair an old one. And even if he did, he knows there are no radios to pick up his signal. He talks vaguely about repairing old ones, of finding a book that will tell him how to do it. I say to him, ‘Radio stations cannot exist without an industrial society.’ And he says, ‘We’ll see about that.’ You see, it’s the programs he’s interested in. He gets other people interested and they sit around talking about programs. He wants only live music. He wants eighteenth-century chamber music in the early morning, but he knows there are no orchestras. In the evenings he meets his Marxist friends and they plan talks, courses, they discuss which line to take. There’s a historian who has written a book and wants to read it aloud in twenty-six half-hour installments.”

  “It’s no good trying to have the past all over again,” I said after a while. “I don’t care about the past, I want to make a future for Marie and myself.” I stopped and we both laughed, for as I denied the past I lay on Diane’s breasts and spoke of living with my mother. It was an old joke between us. We drifted into reminiscences. Surrounded by Diane’s mementos it was easy enough to imagine the world outside the room as it once was, ordered and calamitous. We talked about one of the first days we had spent together. I was eighteen, Diane twenty-six. We walked from Camden Town across Regent’s Park, along an avenue of bare plane trees. It was February, cold and bright. We bought tickets to the zoo because we had heard that it was soon to shut down. It was a disappointment, we wandered despondently from one cage, one moated folly of an environment to the next. The cold muted the animals’ smell, the brightness illuminated their futility. We regretted the money spent on tickets. After all, the animals simply looked like their names, tigers, lions, penguins, elephants, no more, no less. We passed a better hour in the warm talking and drinking tea, the only customers in a vast café of infinite municipal sadness.

  On our way out of the zoo, we were drawn by the shouts of schoolchildren towards the chimpanzees. It was a cage in the style of an enormous aviary, a mean parody of the animals forgotten past. Between rhododendron bushes a jungle track curved, an irregular system of bars for swinging spanned the cage and there were two stunted trees. The shouts were for a powerful, bad-tempered male, the cage patriarch, who was terrorizing the other chimpanzees. They scattered before him, and were disappearing through a small hole in the wall. Now all that remained was what looked like an elderly mother, perhaps she was a grandmother, around whose belly clung a baby chimpanzee. The male was after her. Screaming, she ran along the track and swung onto the bars. They flew around the cage. He was inches behind her. As her trailing hand left one bar, so his forward hand reached it.

  The delighted children danced and screamed as she climbed higher and went faster. The baby clung, its small pink face, half buried in tit and fur, described wide trajectories in the air. Now the two raced across the ceiling of the cage, the female jabbering as she flew and spattering the bars below with her bright green excrement. Suddenly the male lost interest and permitted his victims to escape through the hole in the wall. The schoolchildren moaned in disappointment. The cage was silent and still, chimpanzees appeared comically at the hole and looked out. The patriarch sat high in one corner gazing with bright, abstracted eyes over his shoulder. Slowly the cage filled and the mother returned with her baby. Glancing warily at her pursuer, she gathered up as much of her excrement as she could find and withdrew to a treetop where she could eat in comfort. From the end of her finger she fed small amounts to the baby. She looked down at the human spectators and stuck out her bright green tongue. The infant huddled against its protectress, the schoolchildren dispersed.

  We lay in silence for many minutes after our reminiscences. The bed was small but comfortable, and I felt drowsy. My eyes were already closed when Diane said, “Memories like that don’t bother me anymore. Everything has changed so much I can hardly believe it was us who were there.” I heard her clearly but I could do no more than grunt in assent. I believed myself to be saying goodbye to Diane.

  Outside the day was sunny and warm. I leaned out of my car and waved to her where she stood at the window. I found I knew the controls perfectly, of course, I had always known. The car moved forward silently. I felt hungry and drove past restaurants and cafés but I did not stop. I had a destination, a friend in some distant suburb, but I did not know who. What I was driving along was called the Circle Road. The afternoon was warm, the traffic around me swift and agile, the landscape dehumanized and utterly comprehensible. Place names were illuminated on clinical road signs. A glaring tunnel tiled like a urinal swung from left to right through parabolic curves and pitched violently upwards into daylight. Men and women gunned their engines at traffic lights, faulty machines or incompetent drivers would not be tolerated. Through an open window ringed fingers drummed against the side of a car. Before a towering bra advertisement a man scrutinized his watch. Behind him the colossus tugged at her straps with frozen insouciance. The lights changed and we all leapt forward, content and contempt pressed into the set of our lips. I saw a sad boy astride a supermarket horse while his father stood by and smiled.

  It was bitterly cold and growing dark. Diane was on the other side of the room lighting a ca
ndle. I lay in her bed watching her search for warmer clothes to put on. I felt sorry for her, living alone with all her antiques. We had such easy intimacy but my visits were rare, it was a long walk from south to north and back again, and a little dangerous.

  I did not mention my dream. Diane pined for the age of machines and manufacture, for automobiles were once part of the texture of her life. She often spoke of the pleasure of driving a car, of traveling within a set of rules. Stop … Go … Fog Ahead. I was an indifferent passenger as a child and in my teens I watched their dwindling numbers from the pavement. Diane longed for rules. I said, “I suppose I’d better go,” and began to get dressed. We stood shivering by the door.

  “Promise me something,” said Diane.

  “What is that?”

  “That you won’t leave for the country without coming to say goodbye.” I promised. We kissed and Diane said, “I couldn’t bear you both to leave without me knowing.”

  As usual in the early evening there were a lot of people about. It was cold enough for street-corner fires to be lit and people stood around them and talked. Behind them their children played in the darkness. To make quicker progress I walked in the middle of the street, down long avenues of rusted, broken cars. It was downhill all the way into central London. I crossed the canal and entered Camden Town. I walked to Euston and turned up the Tottenham Court Road. Everywhere it was the same, people came out of their cold houses and huddled around fires. Some groups I passed stood in silence, staring into the flames; it was too early yet to go to sleep. I turned right at Cambridge Circus into Soho. At the corner of Frith Street and Old Compton Street there was a fire and I stopped to rest and get warm. Two middle-aged men on either side of the fire were arguing passionately through the flames while the rest listened or stood dreaming on their feet. League football was a fading memory. Men like these would beat their brains out, or each other’s, attempting to recall details that once came easily to mind. “I was there, mate. They scored before half-time.” Without moving his feet the other pretended to walk away in disgust. “Don’t talk like daft,” he said. “It was a goal-less draw.” They began to talk at the same time and it became difficult to listen.