by Ian Mcewan
But these are shadowy, peripheral subtleties. Essentially I was a disintegrating man, I was coming apart. I was falling asleep at the telephone. My hair began to loose itself from my scalp. My mouth filled with cankers and my breath had about it the stench of a decaying carcass. I observed my business friends take a step backwards when I spoke. I nurtured a vicious boil in my anus. I was losing. I was beginning to understand the futility of my silent waiting games with Helen. In reality there was no situation between us to play with. All day long she sat in her chair if I was in the house. Sometimes she sat there all night. On many occasions I would have to leave the house early in the morning, leave her sitting in her chair gazing at the figures in the carpet; and when I returned home late at night she would be still there. Heaven knows I wanted to help her. I loved her. But I could do nothing till she helped me. I was locked in the miserable dungeon of my mind and the situation seemed utterly hopeless. Once I was a man hurrying by a shop window and glancing carelessly in, now I was a man with bad breath, boils and cankers. I was coming apart.
In the third week of this nightmare, when there seemed nothing else I could do, I broke the silence. It was all or nothing. Throughout that day I walked in Hyde Park summoning the remaining shreds of my reason, my will power, my suaveness for the confrontation I had decided would take place that evening. I drank a little less than a third of a bottle of Scotch, and toward seven o’clock I tiptoed to her bedroom where she had been lying for the past two days. I knocked softly, then, hearing no reply, entered. She lay fully dressed on the bed, arms by her sides. She wore a pale cotton smock. Her legs were well apart and her head inclined against a pillow. There was barely a gleam of recognition when I stood before her. My heart was pounding wildly and the stench of my breath filled the room like poisonous smoke. “Helen,” I said, and had to stop to clear my throat. “Helen, we can’t go on like this. It’s time we talked.” And then, without giving her a chance to reply, I told her everything. I told her I knew about her affair. I told her about my boil. I knelt at her bedside. “Helen,” I cried, “It’s meant so much to both of us. We must fight to save it.” There was silence. My eyes were closed and I thought I saw my own soul recede from me across a vast black void till it was a pinprick of red light. I looked up, I looked into her eyes and saw there quiet, naked contempt. It was all over, and I conceived in that frenzied instant two savage and related desires. To rape and destroy her. With one sudden sweep of my hand I ripped the smock clean off her body. She had nothing on underneath. Before she had time to even draw breath I was on her, I was in her, rammed deep inside while my right hand closed about her tender white throat. With my life I smothered her face with the pillow.
I came as she died. That much I can say with pride. I know her death was a moment of intense pleasure to her. I heard her shouts through the pillow. I will not bore you with rhapsodies on my own pleasure. It was a transfiguration. And now she lay dead in my arms. It was some minutes before I comprehended the enormity of my deed. My dear, sweet, tender Helen lay dead in my arms, dead and pitifully naked. I fainted. I awoke what seemed many hours later, I saw the corpse and before I had time to turn my head I vomited over it. Like a sleepwalker I drifted into the kitchen, I made straight for the Utrillo and tore it to shreds. I dropped the Rodin forgery into the garbage disposal. Now I was running like a naked madman from room to room destroying whatever I could lay my hands on. I stopped only to finish the Scotch. Vermeer, Blake, Richard Dadd, Paul Nash, Rothke, I tore, trampled, mangled, kicked, spat and urinated on… my precious possessions… oh my precious… I danced, I sang, I laughed… I wept long into the night.
In Between the Sheets
That night Stephen Cooke had a wet dream, the first in many years. Afterwards he lay awake on his back, hands behind his head, while its last images receded in the darkness and his cum, strangely located across the small of his back, turned cold. He lay still till the light was bluish gray, and then he took a bath. He lay there a long time too, staring sleepily at his bright body underwater.
That preceding day he had kept an appointment with his wife in a fluorescent café with red formica tabletops. It was five o’clock when he arrived and almost dark. As he expected he was there before her. The waitress was an Italian girl, nine or ten years old perhaps, her eyes heavy and dull with adult cares. Laboriously she wrote out the word “coffee” twice on her notepad, tore the page in half and carefully laid one piece on his table, face downwards. Then she shuffled away to operate the vast and gleaming Gaggia machine. He was the cafe’s only customer.
His wife was observing him from the pavement outside. She disliked cheap cafés and she would make sure he was there before she came in. He noticed her as he turned in his seat to take his coffee from the child. She stood behind the shoulder of his own reflected image, like a ghost, half-hidden in a doorway across the street. No doubt she believed he could not see out of a bright café into the darkness. To reassure her he moved his chair to give her a more complete view of his face. He stirred his coffee and watched the waitress who leaned against the counter in a trance, and who now drew a long silver thread from her nose. The thread snapped and settled on the end of her forefinger, a colorless pearl. She glared at it briefly and spread it across her thighs, so finely that it disappeared.
When his wife came in she did not look at him at first. She went straight to the counter and ordered a coffee from the girl and carried it to the table herself.
“I wish,” she hissed as she unwrapped her sugar, “you wouldn’t pick places like this.” He smiled indulgently and downed his coffee in one swallow. She finished hers in careful, pouting sips. Then she took a small mirror and some tissues from her bag. She blotted her red lips and swabbed from an incisor a red stain. She crumpled the tissue into her saucer and snapped her bag shut. Stephen watched the tissue absorb the coffee slop and turn gray. He said, “Have you got another one of those I can have?” She gave him two.
“You’re not going to cry are you?” At one such meeting he had cried.
He smiled. “I want to blow my nose.”
The Italian girl sat down at a table near theirs and spread out several sheets of paper. She glanced across at them, and then leaned forwards till her nose was inches from the table. She began to fill in columns of numbers. Stephen murmured, “She’s doing the accounts.”
His wife whispered, “It shouldn’t be allowed, a child of that age.” Finding themselves in rare agreement, they looked away from each other’s faces.
“How’s Miranda?” Stephen said at last.
“She’s all right.”
“I’ll be over to see her this Sunday.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“And the other thing…” Stephen kept his eyes on the girl who dangled her legs now and daydreamed. Or perhaps she was listening.
“Yes?”
“The other thing is that when the holidays start I want Miranda to come and spend a few days with me.”
“She doesn’t want to.”
“I’d rather hear that from her.”
“She won’t tell you herself. You’ll make her feel guilty if you ask her.”
He banged the table hard with his open hand. “Listen!” He almost shouted. The child looked up and Stephen felt her reproach. “Listen,” he said quietly, “I’ll speak to her on Sunday and judge for myself.”
“She won’t come,” said his wife, and snapped shut her bag once more as if their daughter lay curled up inside. They both stood up. The girl stood up too and came over to take Stephen’s money, accepting a large tip without acknowledgment. Outside the café Stephen said, “Sunday then.” But his wife was already walking away and did not hear.
That night he had the wet dream. The dream itself concerned the café, the girl and the coffee machine. It ended in sudden and intense pleasure, but for the moment the details were beyond recall. He got out of the bath hot and dizzy, on the edge, he thought, of an hallucination. Balanced on the side of the bath, he waite
d for it to wear off, a certain warping of the space between objects. He dressed and went outside, into the small garden of dying trees he shared with other residents in the square. It was seven o’clock. Already Drake, self-appointed custodian of the garden, was down on his knees by one of the benches. Paint scraper in one hand, a bottle of colorless liquid in the other.
“Pigeon crap,” Drake barked at Stephen. “Pigeons crap and no one can sit down. No one.” Stephen stood behind the old man, his hands deep in his pockets, and watched him work at the gray-and-white stains. He felt comforted. Around the edge of the garden ran a narrow path worn to a trough by the daily traffic of dog walkers, writers with blocks and married couples in crisis.
Walking there now Stephen thought, as he often did, of Miranda his daughter. On Sunday she would be fourteen, today he should find her a present. Two months ago she had sent him a letter. “Dear Daddy, are you looking after yourself? Can I have twenty-five pounds please to buy a record-player? With all my love, Miranda.” He replied by return post and regretted it the instant the letter left his hands. “Dear Miranda, I am looking after myself, but not sufficiently to comply with … etc.” In effect it was his wife he had addressed. At the sorting office he had spoken to a sympathetic official who led him away by the elbow. You wish to retrieve a letter? This way please. They passed through a glass door and stepped out on to a small balcony. The kindly official indicated with a sweep of his hand the spectacular view, two acres of men, women, machinery and moving conveyor belts. Now where would you like us to start?
Returning to his point of departure for the third time he noticed that Drake was gone. The bench was spotless and smelling of spirit. He sat down. He had sent Miranda thirty pounds, three new ten-pound notes in a registered letter. He regretted that too. The extra five so clearly spelled out his guilt. He spent two days over a letter to her, fumbling, with reference to nothing in particular, maudlin. “Dear Miranda, I heard some pop music on the radio the other day and I couldn’t help wondering at the words which …” To such a letter he could conceive of no reply. But it came about ten days later. “Dear Daddy, Thanks for the money. I bought a Musivox Junior the same as my friend Charmian. With all my love, Miranda. P.S. It’s got two speakers.”
Back indoors he made coffee, took it into his study and fell into the mild trance which allowed him to work three and a half hours without a break. He reviewed a pamphlet on Victorian attitudes towards menstruation, he completed another three pages of a short story he was writing, he wrote a little in his random journal. He typed, “nocturnal emission like an old man’s last gasp” and crossed it out. From a drawer he took a thick ledger and entered in the credit column “Review … 1500 words. Short story … 1020 words. Journal … 60 words.” Taking a red biro from a box marked “pens” he ruled off the day, closed the book and returned it to its drawer. He replaced the dust cover on his typewriter, returned the telephone to its cradle, gathered up the coffee things onto a tray and carried them out, locking the study door behind him, thus terminating the morning’s rite, unchanged for twenty-three years.
He moved quickly up Oxfort Street gathering presents for his daughter’s birthday. He bought a pair of jeans, a pair of colored canvas running shoes suggestive of the Stars and Stripes. He bought three colored T-shirts with funny slogans… It’s Raining in My Heart, Still a Virgin, and Ohio State University. He bought a pomander and a game of dice from a woman in the street and a necklace of plastic beads. He bought a book about women heroes, a game with mirrors, a record gift certificate for £5, a silk scarf and a glass pony. The silk scarf putting him in mind of underwear, he returned to the shop determined.
The erotic, pastel hush of the lingerie floor aroused in him a sense of taboo, he longed to lie down somewhere. He hesitated at the entrance to the department then turned back. He bought a bottle of cologne on another floor and came home in a mood of gloomy excitement. He arranged his presents on the kitchen table and surveyed them with loathing, their sickly excess and condescension. For several minutes he stood in front of the kitchen table staring at each object in turn, trying to relive the certainty with which he had bought it. The gift certificate he put to one side, the rest he swept into a carrier bag and threw it into the cupboard in the hallway. Then he took off his shoes and socks, lay down on his unmade bed, examined with his finger the colorless stain that had hardened on the sheet, and then slept till it was dark.
Naked from the waist Miranda Cooke lay across her bed, arms spread, face buried deep in the pillow, and the pillow buried deep under her yellow hair. From a chair by the bed a pink transistor radio played methodically through the top twenty. The late-afternoon sun shone through closed curtains and cast the room in the cerulean green of a tropical aquarium. Little Charmian sat astride Miranda’s buttocks, tiny Charmian, Miranda’s friend, plied her fingernails backwards and forwards across Miranda’s pale unblemished back.
Charmian too was naked, and time seemed to stand still. Ranged along the mirror of the dressing table, their feet concealed by cosmetic jars and tubes, their hands raised in perpetual surprise, sat the discarded dolls of Miranda’s childhood.
Charmian’s caresses slowed to nothing, her hands came to rest in the small of her friend’s back. She stared at the wall in front of her, swaying abstractedly. Listening.
… They’re all locked in the nursery,
They got earphone heads, they got dirty necks,
They’re so twentieth century.
“I didn’t know that was in,” she said. Miranda twisted her head and spoke from under her hair.
“It’s come back,” she explained. “The Rolling Stones used to sing it.”
Don’cha think there’s a place for you
In between the sheets?
When it was over Miranda spoke peevishly over the D.J.’s hysterical routine. “You’ve stopped. Why have you stopped?”
“I’ve been doing it for ages.”
“You said half an hour for my birthday. You promised.” Charmian began again. Miranda, sighing as one who only receives her due, sank her mouth into the pillow. Outside the room the traffic droned soothingly, the pitch of an ambulance siren rose and fell, a bird began to sing, broke off, started again, a bell rang somewhere downstairs and later a voice called out, over and over again, another siren passed, this time more distant… it was all so remote from the aquatic gloom where time had stopped, where Charmian gently drew her nails across her friend’s back for her birthday. The voice reached them again. Miranda stirred and said, “I think that’s my mum calling me. My dad must’ve come.”
When he rang the front doorbell of this house where he had lived sixteen years, Stephen assumed his daughter would answer. She usually did. But it was his wife. She had the advantage of three concrete steps and she glared down at him, waiting for him to speak. He had nothing ready for her.
“Is … is Miranda there?” he said finally. “I’m a little late,” he added, and taking his chance, advanced up the steps. At the very last moment she stepped aside and opened the door wider.
“She’s upstairs,” she said tonelessly as Stephen tried to squeeze by without touching her. “We’ll go in the big room.” Stephen followed her into the comfortable, unchanging room, lined from floor to ceiling with books he had left behind. In one corner, under its canvas cover, was his grand piano. Stephen ran his hand along its curving edge. Indicating the books he said, “I must take all these off your hands.”
“In your own good time,” she said as she poured sherry for him. “There’s no hurry.” Stephen sat down at the piano and lifted the cover. “Do either of you play it now?”
She crossed the room with his glass and stood behind him. “I never have the time. And Miranda isn’t interested now.”
He spread his hands over a soft, spacious chord, sustained it with the pedal and listened to it die away.
“Still in tune then?”
“Yes.” He played more chords, he began to improvise a melody, almost a melody. He could
happily forget what he had come for and be left alone to play for an hour or so, his piano. “I haven’t played for over a year,” he said by way of explanation.
His wife was over by the door now about to call out to Miranda, and she had to snatch back her breath to say, “Really? It sounds fine to me. Miranda,” she called, “Miranda, Miranda,” rising and falling on three notes, the third note higher than the first, and trailing away inquisitively. Stephen played the three-note tune back, and his wife broke off abruptly. She looked sharply in his direction. “Very clever.”
“You know you have a musical voice,” said Stephen without irony.
She advanced farther into the room. “Are you still intending to ask Miranda to stay with you?”
Stephen closed the piano and resigned himself to hostilities. “Have you been working on her then?”
She folded her arms. “She won’t go with you. Not alone anyway.”
“There isn’t room in the flat for you as well.”
“And thank God there isn’t.”
