All the Rage

by A. L. Kennedy

  Hello. You’ll be here and my voice in your hands.

  But mainly she was quite reliable and willing to meet him at various hotels near Euston, or King’s Cross – his choice – suitably anonymous and seedy establishments.

  Perhaps the only thing that limited how often they could be together was his ability to hide the cost of this or that dog-eared double room.

  Perhaps he believed he would be lost if he saw her too frequently.

  Because she was wholly willing. She gave him the purgatory of that.

  Her acceptance – unrelenting acceptance – put a terror in his blood, a type of recurring vertigo. Whatever he requested, she would do: she would dress as he dictated, with barely a hesitation. She would be naked – he was very predictable – beneath her coat and visit bars with him in Loughborough Junction, Ealing, Hampton, places where he wouldn’t be known.

  Hand slipped between her buttons in a cab coming back from Croydon and what I found, what I found, the deep sweet, my best girl’s ache.

  Laughing in another hotel lift, on the rise, not being what you’d call subtle.

  He explored her with harsh appetites for which he blamed her and also thanked her and also blamed her, helplessly punishing and offering. He possessed each access to her, tired her and she allowed him. He tied her up and took advantage, bought a dedicated camera for recording the indignities and marvels, her splendours.

  For several months he stripped and beat her on each of their nights and she made no objection, made no sound. He didn’t intend to hurt her, but spanking was insufficient, so the shameful slap of his belt carried, no doubt, into neighbouring rooms, as did his own cries, his attempts to destroy her silence.

  Which was the last straw.

  In the end, her acquiescence broke his ingenuity.

  Emily made a new nothing. She made it permanent.

  He didn’t want to hit her, he simply couldn’t shake his desperation to leave her marked. Anyone else who undressed her afterwards would find the parallel bruises he had made, not extreme, but unmistakable. Because apparently he had the right. And, without him, she’d remain his statement – not of ownership, he promised her, but of love. He would bite her for similar reasons and hate that he had to and hate who he was.

  ‘Is there anyone? Emily?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look at me, though. Look at me and tell me there’s no one else.’

  ‘There’s no one else.’

  ‘Call me darling.’

  ‘Darling.’

  And that distance in her eyes where she was unreachable and at her loveliest.

  I knew there wasn’t anybody else, there wasn’t honestly even me.

  ‘You could say . . . If you would just say, Emily. It would be all right and I wouldn’t be angry. I would just want you to tell me. Because I love you. Emily? You do know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I love you more than anything, and you’re my real wife and you have to know that. You’re the one that counts.’

  Because she never mentioned love he dropped into harder and harder declarations until he couldn’t bear to hear himself, would nuzzle between her breasts and try to be deafened by her heartbeat as it pounced beneath his ear.

  ‘Darling Mark.’ The way a child would say it, or someone from another country, testing if they could.

  ‘Darling Emily. Thank you. Darling Emily.’

  And when everything else was exhausted, he had to be alone with her and opened. ‘I would marry you if you asked. I would try and we could do that. We could. If you wanted. It would be complicated, but if you wanted.’

  Although their initial excursions to bars delighted him, he learned he should steer her away from too much booze. Uncontrolled drinking made her bleak. Eventually he limited their rendezvous to the hotels, for her benefit. He did his best to care about her in that way and worried if she came to him unsteady or with her skin under that heavy sheen of previous alcohol. On evenings when she was too out of it, he kissed and held her and no more and was glad to feel her dreams shift in his arms. ‘Sweetheart, I have to go now, will you be okay? Are you okay? You should sleep. Keep asleep.’

  I wanted to cure her.

  I did right by her, almost constantly.

  Only that one night when I let myself down. I fell.

  I was closing the door, but I wanted to look at her, a parting glance: naked sprawl of my girl across our evidence, the disarray of a cheap fawn coverlet and dull white sheets, her bared feet towards me, plump. She was sleeping it off. She was sleeping me off.

  ‘Night-night, sweetheart.’ When I’d kissed her forehead and each closed eye, she’d tasted only pure.

  This couple had walked along the corridor at my back and I’d been so absorbed that I hadn’t noticed.

  And then I did.

  And the three of us stood and I knew we were each one of us studying Emily.

  I kept the door open – not for terribly long, a breath, a large instant – but I did give that much of her away. And it made me glad. I wanted them to understand that I could touch this angel and she’d got me.

  She never knew and it didn’t harm her, and then I locked her up safe and the couple moved on.

  She was mine, proved mine.

  Emily.

  He would drive Pauline about – short trips – dance with her or face her at unamusing parties, nod while she talked in supermarket queues, lean near her at the kitchen sink while she washed the dishes and he dried – he did his best to be compliantly domestic when he could – and he would be tight in a fury of needing Emily.

  Mine.

  Unlike his previous lovers, Emily made him have increasingly emotional sex with his wife. He would weep against Pauline’s neatly measured breathing and then have to agree to let her comfort him. His wife as a relief from the truth of fidelity – it was absurd.

  Like staying in a railway station with no trains that we can catch.

  Am I displaying hope or idiocy?

  Are we? Or are we pretending this is acceptable, because we’re in company?

  In it together.

  A problem shared is not a problem, it’s a community.

  And so forth.

  We can’t claim it wasn’t more than possible to foresee – our likely future.

  The fate of our nation.

  And so forth.

  I saw it. I stared at it, sort of, not for terribly long, a breath, a large instant.

  Although I suspect my real focus was elsewhere. That’s likely.

  I wasn’t alone in ignoring multiple warnings.

  Even about trains.

  As a student, he had decided he should seem to take an interest in the wider life. It enriched his social circle.

  More girls.

  His drive to be committedly well informed meant he’d attended a lecture by some playwright.

  Face like a punched scatter cushion and a scholarship boy’s accent.

  A laughably earnest audience had squeezed into the studio theatre at the Barbican Centre and been subjected to the usual liberal/left stuff – here we are in 1984 and it’s ever so much worse than the novel. Smug. The playwright cared. No one could match his extravagant caring, that was plain, and no one else had noticed and resisted the loss of their country’s virtue with quite his intellectual elan.

  His thesis was okay, though – quite elegant, if repetitive. Probably rehashed it for The Guardian. That’s the way to make money: get paid for saying the same thing, over and over again.

  Sorrysorrysorrysorry.

  But I’m the one who pays for that.

  The playwright had made frequent and self-consciously lyrical returns to the break-up and sale of the nationalised railways. Passengers were no longer passengers, they were being redefined as customers. Customers were happy when they bought something, in this case a ticket. Passengers wanted to travel, have politically and economically significant mobility, but instead would have to settle for pieces of thin card and lots of w
aiting. Dissatisfaction was being rendered inarticulate by a maliciously transformed vocabulary.

  Mark had appropriated the idea and used it in arguments whenever he could.

  More girls meant I had to find more ways to impress them. Until I could attempt the obvious.

  Probably why the playwright was pimping himself onstage.

  Both of us aiming to sound insightful and socially engaged.

  Which I also aspired to for real.

  I was going to be that kind of journalist.

  I can’t dismiss all my ambitions as just screwing and manoeuvres.

  I do like to please people, though. And I’m good at screwing and manoeuvres and that pleases lots of people. Readers don’t like insight, engagement, cleverness or any other brands of superiority. They want to feel better and wiser than what they’re reading, but they’re thick and have low self-esteem, so the bottom of the barrel is where I have to scrape to meet their needs. I worked that out early.

  I got a job and made the readers happy.

  Making readers happy is not a bad thing.

  Readers like screwing and manoeuvres.

  Pauline’s friends in the ghastly Welsh pub, they were readers. They wanted Westminster gossip – no politics, only the hissy fits and sex. And they were delighted to hear that a minor TV star got guilty with a hooker, racked by the thought of his wife and kids, and please could he limit his one-night stand to a cuddle and then a kip? Innocent. Except the hooker wakes up in the small hours and the star is ejaculating across her back.

  I can’t tell you his name.

  Well, okay then. But don’t pass it on.

  They adored that. It brought the house down. Pauline something close to proud of me.

  She has zero interest in politics. Another reason to marry her. No use washing it out of your work when you get it in your face at home.

  I have opinions, of course. I’m not a vacuum. And to find what the readers want, I do have to keep informed. I’m not unable to see that citizens have been recast as customers in every sense and must be content with the act of spending and the blessed receipt of nothing.

  Pretty nothing.

  Passing trains.

  The wider life in which it was at one time sexy to take an interest is not going well.

  But I can’t be expected to care. And I shouldn’t attempt to make other people care, it just screws them up. It’s too late for whining and discontent.

  And noticing the ruin of others is the quickest way to ruin yourself.

  ‘Please could you?’

  It surprised him that Emily didn’t also embrace neutrality.

  It was weird that the matter could even arise.

  ‘Please. You could go with me.’

  Because he didn’t talk politics with Emily, either.

  I didn’t want to fake things with her, impersonate a guy who’s concerned about refugees, famines. She was smart, had a mind, and I never thought otherwise, but we didn’t bother with everyday conversations. We were special. We were busy and beautiful and it would have been an ugly waste of time to disturb each other with crap from the front pages.

  We gave each other peace.

  So that evening with her was a shock. ‘You want me to go on a demo?’ A small, nice shock.

  ‘You could. Mark. With me. You could.’

  Demonstrations were fashionable amongst her contemporaries – they had been when he was her age, because they looked good and passed the time – but she had a passion here, too. She’d given matters thought.

  Passions and thought in my absence.

  Unreasonable to be jealous.

  But I was.

  But I was in glory as well, bathed in the joys of her having revealed herself in this regard, of her having asked for something, stated opinions.

  ‘It’s wrong – things are all wrong. Once somebody’s got more than they need, they don’t need more.’ Sincerity thrumming on her skin so noticeably that he wanted to lick her.

  In fact, he did lick her. ‘That’s a slogan, though, Sweets. And things are complicated.’

  ‘People say things are complicated when they don’t want them to change. No one says heart surgery is complicated, so they won’t try it – people want to be alive, so they do it.’

  ‘I think they do say heart surgery’s complicated.’ Her expression hardened against him when he mentioned this – even though he was smiling. ‘Or maybe not now. Maybe it’s easy now. No, I know what you mean and that’s good. It’s a good metaphor. I’ll use it.’ He leaned himself towards the edge of offending her, bruising her principles, so that he could really feel how wonderful it was that she had them and how wonderful it was that she hadn’t completely thrown away her degree. She’d told him that much.

  Five or six weeks after we’d started and she’d wanted to be more to me maybe, to have a little past.

  ‘In sociology?’

  After a deep kind of night.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Her eyes had been very open and very concerned with his own.

  ‘Wow! Darling.’

  ‘Like you’re surprised I got one.’

  ‘Like I’m – no – not surprised . . .’ At which point he found himself losing any explanation that possibly her scuffle and drop between service jobs and periods of unemployment had struck him as unsatisfactory, in the sense of being not good enough for her. And it seemed even more a form of self-harm in the light of her having an, albeit laughable, degree. Her mum was a cleaner, her dad was shady and elsewhere, but she had a degree, the usual debt – more than the usual and something else to do with a grandparent’s savings – and a degree . . . and a much older boyfriend who didn’t want to sound at all paternal. Mark didn’t want to suggest that her being with him was another indication of a reckless and damaging life.

  ‘You want me to be different.’

  ‘No, darling. No. My best girl’s my best girl. Truly. You have to do what you want.’ And he’d kissed her to break the conversation, kept on until they were silence and motion and nothing.

  And I held her once we were done for so long that it appalled me.

  Her later fixation about the demo had allowed Mark to hear himself repeat, ‘You have to do what you want.’ Which was true for everyone. ‘And I have to do what you want and that’s what I want. If you ask – and I like when you ask and you never have asked before, really – then I have to do what you want.’

  She gave me a date and a time – an inconvenient date and time – when she would need me.

  A breakthrough.

  She was breaking through.

  It was mainly gorgeous.

  And she’d placed a minute kiss against his ear. ‘I would like it.’ Sober and giggly and energetic. ‘I would.’ This was Emily showing herself as a credible companion away from the bedrooms. She’d made a promise of ways they might be and he’d accepted it.

  I think we both knew that.

  ‘But a demo, baby . . . Not a concert, or an opera, or the movies, or the zoo.’ It occurred to him that he could only guess at the majority of her pastimes. She remained largely closed to him. ‘Or a club with naked ladies dancing that I would enjoy, but not as much as I enjoy you . . .’ Kissing her in return across her stomach. ‘I haven’t been on a demo since I was a student and that, as we’re allowed to mention, is a long, long time ago.’

  Emily had shaken her head like a woman who loved him and only couldn’t say so because it was too much. ‘Not that long. And if you’ve done it once, then you’ll know how.’

  It made sense – drunks run their lives backwards: from unintimate intimacy to revealing commonplaces.

  He’d had no intention of denying her, but he knew she would like if he teased her. ‘Say “Go with me, darling Mark, and make love to me first for at least an hour.” Go on.’

  ‘Then you’d have to stay the night.’ She offered this as if it were an ordinary sentence and didn’t scald his breath and then remove it. ‘Because we’d have to set out early. Please, d
arling Mark.’

  Staying the Friday night with her and waking and getting the Saturday morning, too.

  If I allowed it, then I’d want it again.

  She would start to show on me and I’d like that and let it happen.

  Sweet Emily.

  I belong to sweet Emily. She’s the girl who has broken me. Wide open. You could park your car inside my chest.

  Watching her light while she rolls out this story about being kettled and the cops pressing in and it’s turning a bit lairy before these kids – she called them kids – start up singing some daft protest song – I can’t recall any protest song that wasn’t a dirge – and the crowd laughs and the cordon pauses and it’s clearly this golden moment for her, proof of something. Hope.

  And I wanted her to hope.

  My generation is at fault – not active like the one before it, not active like the one behind – and she tasks me with this slightly.

  I don’t believe that direct action makes any difference, but she did and it was lovely that she did.

  Her expectations of happy change were as sexy as fuck.

  Emily had kept on, more enthused than he’d known her, while he bled joy and horror invisibly into the sheets. ‘Please, darling Mark, and make love to me first. Yeah? Have I asked like you’d like?’ She was becoming a woman he’d want in her entirety.

  He could have taken out a full-page ad. A Sunday feature. ‘Yes, well, okay. Okay.’ Her lips parted for him, still sticky with the darling that was him translated. His tongue tried to taste the word and failed, because it was given and gone. ‘You’re a funny girl, bad girl. I’ll have to plot like anything, so we can get away with that. Maybe Kempson will let me do colour on the anarchists, or the school kids, or something – the reality of modern unrest. He’ll tell me what reality he wants: brave and sexy sixth-formers with compassion for the urban poor, or home-grown barbarians who want to piss on war graves and buy anthrax . . . Both . . .’

  And this rushing, magnificent lurch in his thinking when he saw her frown, fully display her disapproval. At last.