All the Rage

by A. L. Kennedy

  Historically, this is true.

  Hi, I was calling to

  Hi is better than hello. It’s smaller.

  Hi.

  Or hey. Hey delivered as a smoother version of hi. A dab of sound.

  They will recognise your voice.

  Even from that dab.

  They’ll know it’s you.

  They will know you are you, but quite possibly misunderstand what that implies.

  Hey.

  I was not calling to say that you are endless information. My palms against your back have touched unmistakably the way that you’re built out of shouts and whispers, croons – you have these areas that croon.

  You have sweet shapes.

  You have places about you that shift my senses and make me have to understand your heats as flavours. You lead to kissing. Always.

  You lead to blatant inadequacy and the fear of death, and the kissing blesses all of that away. You unharm me.

  And I will never get used to the times when your breath splinters, or to the necessity of cradling. It is correct to cradle you.

  There have been times when I have heard you and wanted only to run and cure whatever was wrong, whatever could be wrong, whatever might be wrong.

  I am not calling to say that.

  So I won’t say that.

  It would be, to a degree – not that you’re ungrateful – an inventory of things you’ve never asked for.

  Hey.

  I couldn’t predict what you would give me.

  And you’d have to agree, I didn’t ask for it.

  You’ll only tell them the one thing, small sound.

  Hey.

  After which they will have recognised your voice and then they’ll want to chat and you’ll need to be savage and get in there first like a cold-calling salesman.

  Doing this will be vile. Completely. How completely vile of you.

  And thereafter they’ll have their own points they need to make and comments, of course. You will end up having a discussion, conversing.

  You’re already upset, as it is.

  So when they start talking you’ll really be in trouble.

  Hey, I

  You won’t make a call, then. Not any kind of call – not ringing to leave them a message and ducking the issues arising, which would be cowardly to a degree that you might not survive. You might remain despicable to yourself for the duration after that.

  You’ve established – because you intend to live decently, always have – this habit of testing your actions in advance. You ask – will doing this leave me with permanent regrets?

  It’s a not unreasonable question.

  In this case, simply dumping your decision as a fuzzily recorded message, talking when you’re sure that they can’t answer back, would be impossible. It would be too wrong.

  Dear.

  A letter defeats itself from the very start.

  Dear.

  It would be like confessing what you no longer should.

  To Whom It May Concern:

  Which would mean pretending you can’t name them and do not hold them dear.

  You do hold them.

  Dear God.

  To whom we will offer no prayers, because we neither deserve them, nor understand how they would work.

  No letter.

  No.

  No here are your fingers where mine have rested and not been at rest, where they’ve howled, to be more accurate, in the usual manner for you for you for dear you, tendrils of darkness and liquid wishes rippling along the little bones, slowing minorly at each joint and at each thrum where you have previously kissed and the paper was warm when I left it, warm where I paused, where my skin was waiting, and tends to wait and has learned to wait and croons – I like to think it croons and you have found this in me, touched and heard this in my skin – and if you read what I put for you in ink, old-fashioned ink, it will show you the blurs and hesitations in my hope and the shrinking when I get uneasy and my horrible desire to push through and reach you where you will be, where you will be holding my mind in this, my most soft things in this, and you’ll be fragile there and breathing delicate and not enough loved because I have not enough love because there is not enough love because you make sure that my self and my love are both not enough. I mean to be more, but I am not.

  Believe me, I didn’t ask for that.

  And no one meant to give it.

  You do realise.

  And a letter would be inappropriate, because you shouldn’t continue to be opened and unfolded in that manner, it would give the wrong impression.

  Dear.

  Very dear.

  You could instead consider the many electronic options which will keep you eternally untouched. Clean.

  But you can’t type some absence or presence of light across a screen and hope to send it without your self-esteem intervening.

  It would be like wrapping your note round a stone and then throwing it in through their window.

  I just wanted to say.

  There is no easy way to say.

  I have to say.

  You might hit them, hurt them.

  But you’re not a vandal.

  I’m contacting you in this way to tell you I’ll never contact you again.

  You’re not the person this would seem to make you.

  I would love to. I did love to.

  You’re not the person you seem to be when you’re with them.

  You’re not that frail little list of attempts to do better than you have and be better and act better when eventually, you realise, you won’t. You’ll be disappointing. You’ll do worse.

  I think it would be better if you could go.

  I think I would be better if you could go.

  I think I could revert to being worse in a way that would be better if you could go.

  Please go.

  It will make no sense to tell them how much this appals you.

  Unless they are also appalled, which you suspect, and which means that soon they will appal you, which will be completely unbearable and when you ask for their support you won’t, and shouldn’t, get it.

  You can’t let that happen. You can’t wait for that to happen. Not any longer.

  You’re worn out.

  You’re worn out and away.

  Very dear.

  Your only realistic option is to do nothing and to say nothing, to answer nothing and eventually they’ll work out what’s going on and, by then, they will hate you enough for matters to be simpler.

  You don’t want them to have any difficulty. You really, really don’t.

  So very dear.

  Not at any time.

  This Man

  THERE’S THIS MAN and he’s telling you a story. Only he’s not.

  You’re sitting together on uneasy, weatherproof chairs. He’s dragged both of them out here to benefit from the sun, hauled out the table too and nobody from the café made any objections. He seemed authoritative when he said, ‘First good day of the year. How lovely.’ And he left a pause beyond lovely during which he did not look at you.

  Although you were also not looking – not looking at him – you had a clear sense of his not looking. You could feel it. If he’d asked what it was like, you could have told him – it’s like a tender hollowness, or some odd colour in the fall of light.

  He didn’t, of course, ask.

  You didn’t, of course, tell him.

  But you were paying attention.

  You still are.

  He’d then added, ‘Good’ rather quietly and with a kind of helplessness, after which he’d rallied and re-repositioned the seats. Something about his movements during these proceedings had suggested a happy assurance – there might be many areas of doubt, but here he was certain: sitting face-to-face wasn’t going to work. And anyone would have advised that side-by-side was a touch eccentric, if not reminiscent of pensioners waiting to die on a seaside bench – the type local councils fix near pleasant views to memorialise other pens
ioners who once also liked to sit near pleasant views.

  You can imagine – are unable not to – a future within which you might lean against him as you consider your arthritis, or his replacement hip, and how the wind would ruffle what’s left of anything and make you love him all the more, while he loves you back to a comparable degree. Or maybe you’d just eat sandwiches in a bitter and familiar pause and then go home to hate each other for another decade. It’s not uncommon.

  Which is inappropriate. You’re on a first date. Why picture the brownish parka in which you apparently think he’ll take decrepit holidays? Why conjure up domestic horrors and spats over too much pickle that will have dampened the nasty bread? Why assume you’ll have nasty bread?

  It’s not that you believe this nonsense – ‘I can’t abide pickle, I’ve told you. And that bread’s nasty. Where’s my pills?’ – it’s more that you’d rather anticipate fictional disasters than deal with your awareness of how many true things can go wrong.

  ‘They’ll bury you in that parka.’

  ‘I’d like to see them try.’

  This man isn’t a pensioner, or in a parka. He dresses nicely, like a person who understands his own shape. You appreciate it. Without looking. Without looking much.

  And he’d understood the shape he’d required from his surroundings before he’d finally let you sit. He’d needed the chairs at ninety degrees to each other: enough to keep you close across one corner of the table, but not too close. He hadn’t wanted you too close.

  So maybe you’d made him ambivalent from the beginning.

  Or maybe your date is evasive – or else considerate, shy, romantic, a tease, anal-retentive, insanely controlling, or otherwise strange.

  Your mind kicks and shies through a range of distracting suggestions: he might be someone who’s used to cramped tables, possibly keen on camper vans, works in a cubicle, poker player in miniature casinos, brought up on boats, lives in a shed.

  None of this is true.

  But, equally, you’re not too sure what is.

  You do not know him, this man. He is practically a stranger.

  And you can’t think why he chose to see you here: at a concrete theatre complex with an equally concrete café and this concrete square baking airlessly in front where there is no one – no one but this man and you. The other exterior tables and wiser diners and unadjusted chairs are over by the building. They nestle in its shadows, are thickest towards the angle where two wings meet. Ninety degrees again.

  Four ninety degrees, to be technical. You’re in a square – it’s square.

  Perhaps he has a thing for corners.

  Or else he likes display. You do feel that you have been forced to become one half of an event. Inside the café, people are eating ahead of a matinee, grabbing a coffee, studying their programmes, chatting in a manner that suggests they have made good choices in life and are about to savour something enriching and not to just anyone’s taste. Outside, there’s you and this man and what amounts to an audience. Every now and then someone lifts their head in the shade, stops talking, glances over and sees – this couple meeting, this couple having lunch, this man telling this woman a story.

  Only he’s not.

  He isn’t really saying anything.

  He began with the stutter and falter of, ‘Sorry. Excuse me. I’ll just . . . Ah. Well. Hang on.’ And there was the minor chaos you guess that he always draws up and around him: the furniture moving and the scamper back and forth as he fetched superfluous napkins, another spoon, the glass for your apple juice, a glass of ice for the glass for your apple juice, some pepper in a handful of sachets which remain untouched. Then he sat, swallowed audibly and began, running off through longer and longer sentences, looping them forward while he showed you the flinch of his hands, the over-vigorous illustration of salient and mildly amusing points. All his details blur and fade, though, and he reaches no conclusions. He tangles and frequently breaks his own thread, and you feel that his general rush of words amounts to a hedge, a fence, energetic smoke. They are the cover that he ducks behind.

  He was the one who asked to meet you, but he’s now in hiding. He is even crouching to a tiny degree, shoulders tensed, as he tells you the first coat he bought that was properly expensive had actually been a knock-off with fraudulent seams that unravelled and he’d also bought a second-hand stove that harboured almost fatal electrical flaws. You haven’t expressed any interest in fashion, or stoves, or very unwise decisions. Before this, he half-finished an anecdote about cats which seemed intended to be funny, but wasn’t. Perhaps if he’d made it to the end.

  His being so far away and yet here makes you lonely.

  You stare at your lasagne, which is ugly and has congealing historical layers, like a starchy lump of cliff – not something you can eat.

  There’s a plate of allegedly Moroccan casserole in front of him. It hasn’t been attempted.

  This isn’t having lunch with him, this is visiting lunch with him.

  You should have brought your own food to ignore – bad cheese and wet pickle, nasty bread – it would have been cheaper.

  ‘I hate pickle.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been telling you for thirty-seven years.’

  Start as you’d rather not have to continue.

  You remember arriving early – the more important the occasion, the earlier you’ll be – and then having to wander, wait, lean against the warmed bulk of the embankment wall.

  It felt good, reliable, relaxing.

  Not like this.

  You’d looked down at the retreated tide and the narrow drifts of dirty sand it had abandoned. They made you think this lets it seem that somewhere underneath the grey and the burden of straight edges, unnatural angles, London could still be a living thing and might simply shrug one random morning and crack its surfaces and let fundamental elements – sand, rock, water – run loose.

  Which might just have been something to consider rather than considering this man and your imminent meeting, or it might have been caused by the slowed and silvered air and the city being briefly turned to silhouettes, lacework and bright prospects. There was a sweetness when you breathed, as if leaves were waking somewhere out of sight.

  You were happy. Unmistakably.

  You didn’t quite believe that you were happy because of him, but could have been persuaded.

  Then he arrived – quick and with a slight flail in his limbs, a vaguely tangential approach – and his nervousness made you nervous, as if he had identified a threat you couldn’t place.

  They’re worse now, your nerves, because you are so firmly by yourself. Still, he would do you no harm. You can tell. This is rare in men, in people, and is therefore attractive and it makes you miss him.

  You allow yourself – I miss him.

  And you watch the side of his face as he laments the failures of professional carers, and dentists in particular. His own glass of apple juice is raised, but he does no more than peer at it for an instant and put it down again, being unable to either halt or drink.

  Apart from your bottle of apple juice, you’ve got water and a pot of tea. You have to suppose you expected to be thirsty. And then there’s the glass of melting ice.

  You’re not thirsty.

  You pour out some juice and add ice, cube by cube, so slowly that it hurts your fingertips.

  It may be that you miss him less and are at the edge of being bored.

  You pour out some tea, add ice to that.

  He forgot to bring milk and so did you. No way you’re going to mention it now and send him haring off again. You’ll have your tea iced and wish for lemon, but not ask for that either.

  You’re not exactly listening any more.

  His throat, his neck – you want to touch them with the chill of your fingers, find out if they’re as soft and private as they seem, as delicate. The sudden necessity of this prickles in your hands, it nags, and you’re no longer bored. It co
uld be that you’re irritated. You don’t know.

  Then his knee – dunt – politely – dunt – rests for a breath against yours – dunt – withdraws – dunt – returns and stays, grazes up and then down and then stays with a pressure which is nearly an absence and therefore aches.

  He is – still talking, still focused beyond your right shoulder – with you.

  You do not move.

  You are – the concrete around you visibly in tiny motion, every surface changing beneath the heat – with him.

  He is with you.

  You are with him.

  At least, this could be the case.

  He is describing his mother – his mother up a set of steps and being scared to change a light bulb – that reaching up, angled head and unsteady hands, lifted eyes, the risk of a fall in return for illumination. He makes it real. He takes away his knee. Whatever he’s recalling makes him sad and his eyes, when they find yours, are fast and open and right here and have a shine of pain in them and a deeper intention you can’t grasp before it goes.

  And now it’s all silent.

  Miles off, years off, it could be that you can hear other voices, meaningless voices, and the stir of the city, an aircraft hanging in the distance – this doesn’t matter.

  The silence continues.

  You have no idea what to do.

  He nods. He sips his apple juice. His eyes become ordinary and cautious before they refocus beyond you. Softly, he describes a trip to Dublin and you reach your fingers as far as his arm and you touch it, when you hadn’t anticipated that you would. To be accurate, you don’t notice that you’ve moved until the cloth of his jacket is warm against you, those one-two-three-four-and-the-thumb little areas of you. At the same time, you realise you’re not being comforting because you’re too late. Your gesture will seem like an unwilling afterthought. He sort of turned to you, tried you, was possibly upset, possibly about his mother, and you’ve demonstrated how you won’t support him, won’t help until he doesn’t need it.

  You’ve made a mistake.

  Not a big one.

  But personal situations like this – slightly undefined, barely begun – are fragile and it seems he is quite unforgiving, because after you withdraw your hand, his shoulders drop and the Dublin excursion ends with, ‘. . . anyway. Where was I . . .?’ Something about him seems to have given up.