* * *
But I was tied by an airport vow. 11.55 Gatwick. I had got there early, nervous after my fit in the swimming pool. They had kept me in hospital until Saturday afternoon and I had gone straight back to the flat and to bed, feeling heavy, as if I was deeply hung over, and not wanting to speak to anyone. Johnny had brought me tea in bed and tried to talk to me, but I had pushed him gently away, sleep all I could think of. Johnny roused me the next morning and I drove to the airport, still feeling heavy. The butterflies, which are normally so pleasurable when you’re going to meet someone close that you haven’t seen for some time, weren’t right. I realised that I was not enjoying this sensation.
I had coffee within view of the arrivals exit and watched the expressions on people’s faces. There is something quintessentially voyeuristic about airports; emotions normally played out in private are on display. I imagined being a writer and creating stories around characters and events based on the brief glimpse of a stiff or passionate greeting, a fraught or gentle farewell. I would spend time at departures and arrivals for my plots. As I scanned the faces, I imagined that these were the people I had come to meet, and invented roles for them in my life. There were long-lost cousins of Indian decent in the flight from Nairobi, a lover who had revealed a heroin addiction on the night of our honeymoon . . . This was the kind of game my sister and I revelled in. We would spend hours people-watching and inventing entire rose-tinted lives. It was four months since I had seen her. We had never been apart so long.
I walked over to the announcement board. Yes, the flight had landed. I found myself a seat close to the bar near the path for arriving passengers, ready to jump up the moment I saw her. She was bound to be last, her luggage would be last, she would be stopped at customs. I must control my nerves. The butterflies in my stomach were flapping in frantic circles, colliding with each other in a vacuum, as if the inside of my body was one enormous empty, echoing tunnel. Now, I was excited.
At last the passengers on her flight were coming through, mostly Argentines spontaneously lighting up in relief after the long hours of a British Airways flight, all blonde hair and suntans. I was straining over the barrier now, as if I could see around the corner and catch sight of her before she saw me. As people turned into view I examined them with the absurd yet typical intensity of those who wait at the arrivals point. As if, should their attention waver for an instant, they might miss the person they love most in the world; as if they need to scrutinise the features on each face to make sure they haven’t failed to recognise their mother or their son. I watched. I waited.
She was not on the flight.
Chapter 19
Sometimes, usually late at night, it was as if she was with me. I would sit on my balcony, turning the lights and the shadows of the buildings around me into nowhere. I could hear her voice.
‘You’re getting it all wrong. You can’t do it if you take things so seriously. You’ve always taken things too seriously. Relax, enjoy. Don’t think so much.’
‘That’s easy for you to say. You haven’t had to deal with this.’
‘Look, it’s all about temperament. You panic too quickly.’
‘Fine, so what am I supposed to do now?’
‘Breathe – breathe slowly and open your eyes.’
‘Fuck you, I hate your smugness.’
‘Do you?’
* * *
One evening I opened my eyes and saw a man masturbating in a flat almost directly opposite mine. I watched, disgusted and fascinated. The lights in his bedroom were off and his erection was lit by the flickering blue glare of a television set. He pumped away with his hand, oblivious to the fact that the French windows gave him no privacy – or perhaps revelling in this. I wondered for a moment if he could see me, but reasoned that this was impossible and, besides, he was clearly engrossed by the television screen. I looked away, horrified at what, again, seemed to clinch the essence of ‘city’: the ability to watch, unchecked, an anonymous orgasm from the balcony of your own home.
When I looked back, unable to contain my own morbid curiosity, he was standing at the window, gesturing at someone. He was making a thumbs-up sign. Appalled, I realised he was looking at me. I turned away and forced calm into my step as I retreated into my flat.
‘Is this what you had in mind?’ I reproached the other voice, ever watchful, in my head.
‘Oh, lighten up. People masturbate all the time. What’s the big deal?’ I thought of all the times I had sat unknowingly in his view.
‘There you go again. What makes you think this isn’t the first time he’s noticed you? What’s the harm in it anyway? He hasn’t touched you.’
‘But it’s as if he has. I didn’t have a choice.’
‘You chose to watch him.’
‘I couldn’t help it. I was curious.’
‘Maybe you both were!’
‘Stop it. Stop making it seem as if we were colluding.’
‘OK, OK. Calm down.’
I needed to get away from her voice, from the flat, from this city.
I found a coffee bar.
‘Your problem is you’ve been spending too much time alone.’
‘For Christ’s sake, will you just leave me in peace? Right now, I need to be alone.’
‘You think you do, but you don’t.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘No, you don’t.’
Despite myself, I longed suddenly for conversation or a man’s body, anything to distract me from this interminable dialogue. Our worst arguments had always been because she thought she knew better. I resented the assumption that she understood what I was thinking, that she understood me better than I understood myself. And the worst of it all was that she was usually right.
The scrape of a chair made me look up. Someone – a man, unusually tall – was speaking to me.
‘Is this seat unoccupied?’
‘No, I’m afraid it’s terribly busy,’ I felt like saying. I looked at him carefully to make sure he bore no resemblance to the Blue Masturbating Machine.
‘Yes, have a seat,’ I said.
‘Bravo!’ said my sister.
Chapter 20
‘You should be careful, you know.’
‘Don’t worry, Ana, I’m a grown woman. I can look after myself.’
‘But you’re a foreigner. Men here won’t understand you.’
I marvelled at the image people had here of English women. ‘Ana, you know I don’t make a habit of picking people up in bars, but this one’s OK, honestly.’
‘Well then, invite him to my birthday party next Saturday.’ Ouch.
‘OK, I will.’
* * *
I didn’t.
‘So where’s the new prince?’ laughed Ana as she welcomed me in.
‘Fighting demons,’ I replied.
‘His or yours?’
Ana had not directly broached the subject of why I was in Argentina again, but as our friendship had grown, she never missed an opportunity to gently tease me.
‘Don’t worry, there’s someone else here I want you to meet.’
‘Ana, I’ve told you before, no matchmaking!’
‘Strictly platonic. He’s not over his divorce yet, but very good-looking! I’ve told him there’s a mysterious English woman with a shady past coming tonight.’
‘Ana!’
I brush-kissed the cheeks on the way to the drinks table, combining English and Argentine mores, helped myself to a very large gin and tonic and promptly nearly dropped it.
‘Ignacio, what the hell are you doing here?’
‘Ah, I thought it had to be you when Ana told me she had an English friend.’
‘You are a friend of Ana’s?’
Ignacio came from another compartment in my life, a drawer that had been closed. It seemed somehow impossible that he could know Ana and Daniel, and I must have sounded absurdly incredulous. He laughed softly.
‘Yes, I’ve known her for years. How are you?’
&nbs
p; ‘Fine, I’m fine.’
I knew I had said it too quickly. I wondered how he was. He looked different. There was something unkempt, not just about his looks, but his whole demeanour, and I realised how little I knew about this man. I didn’t even know if he was married, and then I twigged that this was the man Ana had wanted me to meet and she had mentioned something about a recent divorce.
‘So you knew I was going to be here?’ I changed the subject in my head.
‘Not for sure, but I guessed it might be you. What have you been up to?’
The question was hesitant and self-conscious, and I squashed an impulse to feel sorry for him. Why wasn’t he angry with me?
‘Well, I haven’t dumped any more men in any transitorios, if that’s what you mean!’ I was trying to make light of it, but knew it was coming out all wrong.
‘Well, I’m very pleased to hear that.’ He had retreated into his therapy voice and I felt a pang of tenderness I needed to banish.
‘So, apparently you are divorced?’
‘Yep, apparently I am.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I interjected quickly, ‘you don’t need to tell me about it. In fact, let’s talk about Ana and Daniel.’
* * *
The next time I saw Ana, I told her the prince I’d failed to bring to her party had also failed to rescue the princess.
‘Nothing to do with Ignacio, I hope?’
‘Ana, what are you talking about?’
‘Oh, just a hunch.’
‘Absolutely not.’
Chapter 21
He had realised, as soon as Ana described the eccentric English woman, that it was her. Had thought enough time had passed to face her. He was rebuilding his life, slowly, deliberately, like a very old man trying to remember how to play with Lego blocks.
What shocked him was how haggard she looked. He had concentrated so hard on measuring his own vulnerability that he was staggered by the aura of vulnerability which surrounded her now. He watched her that night in the company of others and felt that he was watching a bad play. He fought the pangs of protectiveness, padding gently round her in tentative conversation. She was distant, but did not avoid his company. He left early, aware that she was still a threat to the careful reconstruction of his life.
* * *
The first building blocks had been pragmatic. In an attempt to remove himself from the associations he found most stressful, he had won Carolina’s agreement (via the lawyer) to sell the house and had moved into something more befitting his new bachelor status. A flat that was crisp and clean and new, with a high-rise French window view over the city skyline, beautiful at night, sobering in daylight. He worked, ate badly and learnt to spend time alone.
It struck him that a city at night became truly international. New York, Cairo, Cape Town, Buenos Aires – if you let your eyes relax into soft focus at night, you could be in any one of them. In an attempt to process his new status, he toyed with the idea of leaving Buenos Aires altogether, of really removing himself from the associations that had made him what he was, of finding a new life in London or Rio.
He feasted his eyes on women in the street and toyed with their ghosts beneath the sheets, yet he did not seek their company. Nor did he seek the company of friends. Many, in any case, were mutual friends who belonged to their marriage; friends who, he guessed, had been claimed by Carolina; who would feel uncomfortable with the apparently unrepentant lifestyle he had embraced; who would be unforgiving if they knew that he saw his children just once every two weeks – and dreaded it every time.
Carolina, true to her nature, was unrelenting in her resolve. She refused to even meet him for a coffee or speak on the phone. He resorted to conversations with her sister to reassure himself that she was alright, that the children were alright.
‘Bachelordom’. He kicked this around in the confines of his flat and watched the letters rearrange themselves into ‘boredom’ on the windowpane. In the end he sought company for pragmatic reasons. He became aware of an aloofness at work, which was distracting him from his patients. He put this down to a lack of normal communication in his day-to-day life and so he picked up another piece of Lego: old friends. Some he had to woo after his ‘absence’, others were grateful that he had not looked to them for support they were too busy to give.
Daniel he had played paddle tennis with. They had tried going out for dinner once, the four of them, but conversation had been strained and Carolina had disliked Ana. Now he found himself at ease in their company. They were the only ‘family’ he felt able to visit without a current of unspoken rebuke.
Buenos Aires had a way of making six degrees of separation feel very evident. For all its sprawling size, social circles overlapped time and time again. So perhaps it was inevitable that he should bump into Jenny again one day. He was grateful, at least, that he had been forewarned.
Chapter 22
The Blue Masturbating Machine made its next appearance during dinner one evening, catching Sally unawares.
‘Good God!’ she blushed. ‘There’s a man in that flat, masturbating!’
‘For God’s sake don’t look at him, Sally.’
‘You don’t mean to say he can see us, do you?’
‘I just don’t want to run the risk, that’s all.’
‘I think you’re very wise, Jenny.’
Henry, oh Henry. I wondered what Nick would have said.
‘I wonder how Nick’s getting on in England,’ said Sally suddenly.
Funny how a man masturbating made us all think of Nick! I raised my glass in gentle reverence. ‘Here’s to Nick, wherever he is.’ My English dinner parties were dull without him.
Over Sally’s shoulder I caught a glimpse of the thumbs-up sign.
‘Forget it,’ said my sister over my own shoulder. ‘Just ignore him. Don’t let him get to you.’
‘Jenny, what do you think?’
I realised vaguely that Henry was asking me a question. ‘Sorry, I missed that. What were you saying, Henry? Actually, would you mind if we sat inside?’
* * *
He was getting to me. My privacy was no longer my own. I was sleeping in fits and starts. I felt as if a rat was steadily gnawing away at the boxes I’d been trying to erect around the different parts of my life. I wasn’t even sure that I would recognise him in the street, yet the vision of his self-satisfied, salivating thumbs-up sign plagued my dreams. I had started to avoid my own balcony and to spend more and more time outside, in bars and cafés. I grew jumpy in supermarket queues, started to see him in innocent faces around me. My sister and I argued. She insisted that I was being melodramatic, laughed at my unvoiced fears and told me to put a cork in my imagination.
Then, one day it happened. The telephone rang and I knew it was him. I tried to beat back intuition. There was no reason why it should be him and not someone else. It was late, but then people often called me late at night. I let it ring. The answer machine was off and it kept ringing. Somewhat self-consciously, but sweating nevertheless, I dimmed the light and moved over to the balcony to peer into the blue room. Sure enough, the Blue Masturbating Machine was on the phone.
I left the flat, taking care to leave the lights as they were. By the time I had had a coffee, I had decided not to go rushing round to Ana’s or to Henry and Sally’s. That would be the end of privacy. I still needed my independence, so I returned – quietly, gently – and slept a type of sleep.
The next day I phoned around my friends, dropping my question bashfully into the conversation.
‘By the way, you didn’t happen to call me last night, did you?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Oh, just that the phone went when I was in the shower and I didn’t get to it in time.’
A week later it happened again, only this time there was no light or television on in the blue room, so I couldn’t actually see him. I shuddered to think of him masturbating in the dark on the end of a phone which was connected to the phone ringing in my room. Six degrees of
separation. I baulked at the power of technology: rapists and murderers within random digital reach of every phone owner in the city. This time I cowered in my room behind drawn blinds, reaching out, uselessly, for someone who would never be there.
I missed my classes the next morning and lost another client. My income was dwindling dangerously, yet this hardly registered. The resolve that had kept me going from the moment I had decided to come to Argentina – despite everything, through everything – was shrinking. Where was my bravado taking me? Where had my fantasies brought me? To the darkness of a ninth-floor flat, sweating at the sound of a phone.
What would Ignacio have had to say about me now? What would Nick have thought? Where was the stubborn, self-sufficient English woman I had cultivated? Only an overriding sense of self-loathing stopped me from turning to anyone, talking to anyone, as if even the fear of being stalked in my own flat was preferable to the potential stigma of paranoia.
I had been punished once as a child for being paranoid. Then there was someone who understood. This time I would deal with it alone, and this time I would not risk judgement.
* * *
Then Ana dropped a bombshell.
‘By the way, I hope you don’t mind, but I gave Ignacio your phone number.’
‘You did what?’
‘Hey, don’t bite! It doesn’t commit you to anything, you know. He just seemed interested in making contact, that’s all.’
Something bubbled up inside me, something between anger and hope already spilling into relief, and she must have seen me pale.
‘When? When did you give it to him?’ I knew my voice was sharp, but I was struggling with a dryness at the back of my throat.
‘A few days ago. No, it must be a couple of weeks or so ago now. I’m surprised he hasn’t called.’
‘Can you remember when exactly?’
‘Why is it so important? Look, take his number and you can ring him yourself.’
Twin Truths Page 5
