Which means that he’s not responsible for any previous offence. “Nobody bit me. Don’t be stupid.” Which can be offensive in itself. And I’d like, just now, to keep a hold of my resentment—it will stop me getting tired.
But Robert’s working at me, leaning against my arm, making sure I meet at least one solid, lock-picking look, the kind that lets him nudge into my mind and change it. Not that I won’t feel better when he does.
Outside, the rain is scraping down in a solid mass, roping and marbling across the coloured glass in the windows and the smallness of the pub seems protective and intended. I would like to stay here. That’ll be tricky if I’m still arguing with Robert. And this is just what his expression suggests—that we must be friends and please each other, please ourselves.
He is soothing now, as he means to be. “What did they do to you? Tell Robert what they did and he will go and sort them.”
“Nobody did anything, I did . . .” This becomes too complicated to explain and I realise I want to slap him and I want to understand if we’re going to be only friends or not—if we’re going to meet here, time after time, or if we’ll ever leave this tatty box full of elderly men and be somewhere else together again, alone again, the way that we were at the racetrack, in the car. Not that the car was the way I’d have wished, I can recall that it wasn’t ideal, but we meant well, we did our best. Anyway, I want us to be alone together and under more suitable circumstances. Or I want to be finally sure that we never will be and able to go away and not think about him. I want him to leave me or help me. I want a clue. “Fuck you, Robert.”
Of course, this is when he brightens and the colour in his eyes begins to deepen and turn soft. “Oh, is that it?” And I can feel the slip and tumble of the lock
Together, we raise our arms from our sides just a little to suggest that we would like to hug now, if that’s okay with both of us.
Late-evening reflexes stumbling in, our hold rocks and heats and steadies and I don’t know if we are both open now and freed for this, or if we’ve been finally caught by our touch and a mechanism has sprung shut. We may be happy or trapped, but still we blur into each other, that’s what I’m sure of, what I like. We balance, unified. I kiss his mouth and miss a little, catch a tart press of fading stout and then his sweet, salt sweat. So I almost forget the way it was this morning when I held the woman on the pavement, held her, and covered myself in her blood.
Robert breathes into my hair, warming the top of my head. His shirt smells of cigarettes and future nakedness. “Is that it? Fuck me? Fuck you? I mean . . . I mean, the last time . . .” He sounds liquid. So near to last orders, his voice is working towards one smoothed, true sound, it’s singing. “Thought youwere pissed off. After it. When we’d . . . Then. Thoughyou were pissed off withme . . . scared of you . . .”
And I’m almost the same. “I had to throway a blouse today. My shoes. Chuck ’em.”
“Mm?” Both his hands at the small of my back, resolved and concentrating. We don’t fit the bar any more, it hasn’t the ambience for this. “Youblouse . . .”
“Won’t wear that suit again.”
“Quiright.” His hip shifting to ease beside the crest of mine. “You needn’t, too . . . not anything you donwant.” He frowns with solicitude and I grow teary, lick his neck. He whispers, forcing the syllables, making them carry his heat. “So I’ll take you home? Go back finish what you started? You’ll ruin me, you know that . . . making me want . . . such things.”
“Someone. I threw someone out of a wheelchair today.” Whispering back with Robert’s breath so near that we take each other’s pace, accommodating every rise and fall. “Threw an old lady out a wheelchair . . . when theyall came to help her I ran away.” Like this we are invisible and safe, hidden in ourselves. “I din mean it.”
He twitches against me, then kisses my ear. “An olady?”
“Yes.”
The twitch digs again, enquiring, “Little olady?” And his lips tickle my cheek, knowing and playing and stealing me out of my head.
“Yes.”
We both have this tremor now between us, a problem of breath. “A tiny, little ol . . .” The tremor worsens, jabs. And when I exhale, I discover that we are laughing, both laughing. Very, helplessly and badly and loud. “A . . . hol lady.”
“Teeny-weeny lady.”
Although we shouldn’t be happy, shouldn’t even seem happy.
“Wha she do—mug you?”
Although this is awful and hurts our throats and rises up in yelps and coughs and a roaring that sways us, parts us, clatters us in.
“No. But I threw her.”
“Very far?”
And because we are dreadful and have no excuse and because I can’t think about it any more, can’t have it under my eyelids, or keep the sound she made stuck in my throat, or hear the wee tune she was singing— because I can’t put up with it, there is nothing for me—for me and for Robert—but to howl even louder, to shout and squeal.
We are ruined by the time we lean away and see each other, we are wrecked. Robert snuffles and dunts in against my shoulder, eyes wet. “All this . . . you know? . . . you think you can’t believe it . . . sometimes . . . murder and blood and dead babies and God . . . I was telling Doheny, he was here but he’s gone . . .” He wipes one cheek with the heel of his hand and sighs unevenly. “Things like—people eat their children, people do that—God lets them—or what if my father killed my mother? Hm? I’d be laughing the rest of my life . . .”
“Or my father killed my mother?”
“Did he? Christ, that’s . . . incredibly . . . fuck, I feel nearly sober . . .”
And there is a pause here while we think that we have to go now, leave and make ourselves content. Then we kiss in a small way, this being all that we can bear, while the ache of what we will do next, must do next, hauls us straight out of the pub and across to the car which Robert threads through the shine of the downpour and the running streets until we find my flat.
Beyond that, it’s a dash through the sting of rain and letting it make us new, clean, lively, and send us swinging up the stairs, feet unsure of things, but coping well in any case, all the way to my door and the usual business with keys and a shrinking lock and Robert not helping, distracting, but in the end we get inside and start the flail of coats and little arguments with buttons and glimpses of warmth and hints of skin and then both of us are simplified and clear and we do what we should have done weeks before, we do it a lot, we do it until the first birds sing the false dawn, then the real one, until Robert has to scramble out of bed, run to the car with his shirt half fastened, in a rush to be ready for morning surgery.
He accelerates away from the building with a tyre-screech that echoes in the street, earning loud and ironic applause from the flat above mine. Which is fair enough: we may very well have disturbed them—we were undoubtedly noisy enough to have woken anyone and then to have kept them sleepless the whole night. Because that’s how we wanted it to be.
IV
Eldest and only children, we’re worriers. This is our parents’ fault. We are the first time they’ve done offspring and they have concerns: they suspect we may die or be injured in commonplace, or dreadful, or else quite mysterious ways and so, however happy they may be that we are here, we also prepare in them an undoubted anxiety. We notice this. While we dream in our cots, they prowl round close at hand: partly out of love, or relief that we are quiet, but also because we may simply stop breathing at some preordained, but unknowable, point. Their fears for us weaken the air above our faces and do, in fact, make it tiring to inhale. Surrounded by caution, however affectionate, we grow up suspicious and, whether tentative or reckless, we all know that something awful could overwhelm us at any time.
And then, perhaps, our parents make other, younger children over whom they hardly ever seem to fret. My mother and father—they were thoroughly relaxed around Simon, having tried this parent stuff before without fatalities. So, like a good,
eldest child, I worried in their place and kept watch on Simon as if he were kittens, or spun sugar. Whenever I did this I felt contented and in the right, but also aggrieved—not because my parents weren’t caring enough towards him, only because it might be that he didn’t need their care. As I grew older, I wondered if they saw signs in him that I could not and were therefore sure that Simon wouldn’t lead himself to dangers, or be led: that he would be unscathed by nature, while I was not. Needless to say, this worried me.
I now worry most in my mornings, that’s why I hate them—mornings, early evenings, periods spent in bank queues, or near banks, or any part of any Sunday—Sundays are bad. A whole, empty Sunday, lurking on your pillow with the dawn, when you want to stay impenetrable and asleep: you have to avoid that: you have to really concentrate on keeping yourself less than conscious until it’s turned Monday again. Or else, you can try my own method of self-defence, which is to work during Sundays and then take your Wednesdays off.
Although this doesn’t always help, because a morning is still a morning, even more so when it’s taken off. For instance, this Wednesday, the new one I’m staring at—it seems desolate, unsafe, and I am delicate at the moment, due to last night’s liquids, and disorientated, too: being currently covered in echoes and ghosts.
Robert left hours ago, but the imprint of him woke me all over again, moving. My skin has shouted up through every dream, playing and replaying him: the shimmer of hands, mouth, stomach, tongue, fingers, his touch as whole as water closing round me, slipping me under, finding everything. And inside, Robert inside, locked, the feel of him rocking, darting, searching, the way he was.
In the vacant daylight, my body has stopped remembering. As soon as I rolled over, stretched, that began to leave me. And my mind can’t help me: it knows he was in this bed, nothing more.
So I can smell us having worked here together and that vaguely sugary, caramel scent that he has about himself, but I can’t catch a hold of last night—our first proper, improper night—I don’t have one fixed detail, except that he fetched me a glass of water.
Lying shoulder to shoulder and the stone weight of his arm across my hip, doubling up our temperature where he touches, until I tell him that I’m thirsty, only for water, just that. And the night is already shading grey outside and we are almost done and I turn with the shift of the mattress and see the shape of him walking from my room—my one room with its walls wedged in against my bed and my table and my sofa and my chair. He goes past the bathroom I’ve never repainted and on to the kitchen, which I have, and he starts up the clattering search for a glass.
I think of him treating cupboards to the sight of Robert Gardener naked, then closing their doors on some permanent shade of that and stepping back. Finally, I hear him running water, letting it pour until it’s raced itself cold in the pipe, until he can slope to my bed, our bed, his hands wet, and offer me the courtesy of water that’s almost too chill for my lips, that tastes of him, that tastes of us, us fucking. He shares the glass, then dips his fingers in and lets them drip on to my collar bone.
He tick-tocks me back to the seal of our arms around my memory and then I have the weight of forgetfulness, of losing us.
I would rather remember. I would rather have more.
Then again, I’m surrounded by things that are not as they should be, not what I want. I would like to change the chair that I brought home with me one night and left beside my table to surprise me when I woke— it has a roguish, dog-eared air that I do not enjoy. Likewise, I’d prefer a telephone wholly compatible with British wiring: one which would not generate bills that I have to delay with folded, stapled and purposely illegible cheques. These are not major troubles, but in they rush to pester me, because this is a morning and so I am vulnerable.
They follow me through to the kitchen where I make a small glass of milk with Cointreau, which is both a fruity bracer and light breakfast, as long as you get it down before it curdles. The initial dose is faintly shocking—but you’ll trample on a toddler to get the next.
Thereafter, I’m an ounce more bright. Still, this doesn’t stop me wondering when Robert might be here again: soon, I would like to hope. Did we arrange that, another visit to my flat? Which is one more thing that I detest, my flat: from the aubergine bathroom suite to the half-finished carpet tiling in the minuscule hall: and its rent is justifiably low, but possibly, in the end, through no fault of my own, I will be beyond paying and turned out on the street and with nowhere else to go, unless I slink off to my parents—my parents who live on the other side of town and who will, doubtless, have heard that I’m back in the dear, old birthplace, back in the gossipy, swollen village that calls itself a city, the greasy, grey-faced hole where no one can ever be truly unobserved.
I was going to tell them I’d come home, but first I was busy and then I was nervous and then my delay was embarrassing, a stumbling block in itself, and now it’s four months, five, and I worry that I’ve hurt them and I worry they’ll think badly of me and I worry, now that I mention it, whether Robert isn’t thinking badly, too—if only because yesterday I threw a woman from a wheelchair to save myself some temporary stress. That isn’t a completely normal thing to do.
And, I mean, my life is nowhere near as simple as it may appear. Being me is a job—is labour so time-consuming and expensive that I have to have a second job just to support it. So that I can drink, I have to get drink and that isn’t something people give away and then there’s the drink that I need because I have drunk and the other drink I have to keep around because, sooner or later, I will drink it. That’s a full-time occupation: that’s like being a miner, or a nurse. I involve constant work. Robert said he’d be the cross that I would bear, because he didn’t understand my situation and couldn’t know that was a lie. I already have my cross: we’ve been getting acquainted for years.
The truth of the matter is: yes, you do carry the weight of it, drag it along and heartily wish you were free—especially during mornings, early evenings, periods spent in bank queues, or near banks, or any part of any Sunday. You believe that you should not, and cannot, go on and, naturally, you are right.
Because in the end, you will always trade places: this is a physical law: that your cross will change to something merciful, will lift your body up and start the task of bearing you.
I drink myself higher, it’s all I need do to ascend. This is my meditation when the worrying gets bad—in conjunction with this lovely truth: that many others long before me have recognised the nature of my calling and left ingenious clues behind them to that effect. Al-khol, ethanol, ethyl alcohol—we christened drink in the magic of distillation, we baptised it with tokens of its heat, the words we give it kindle, burn, shine. They are made out of alchemy, spirits: coloured with Arabic, Latin, Greek: and they hide within their syllables the names for primordial matter and for the ether that soothes between everything, that permeates all substance and all space. C2H5OH—generations before its components were discovered, we understood the essence of alcohol, its absolutes: that it is oxygen and hydrogen and carbon—the earth’s irreplaceable elements, the water of our life.
I work this all out in my kitchen: how it makes sense and is like a poem, in that it also makes no sense whatsoever, but in any case touches you very much.
When I try to repeat my insights in the bar some few days later, the phrasing does not prosper and I probably lose my thread a little, because I am having to yell—a party of suits has come in and is being disruptive and dragging the volume up. They don’t belong here, they are not like the rest of us.
I am yelling at Sniffer Bobby who would be, even in a library, hard of hearing—something to do with explosions and national service. So I have to be loud. I must also be seamless to prevent him from thinking I’ve finished and then shoving in with an anecdote from the days when he used to sniff. Which is to say, the halcyon time when he rode with removal firms and had as his primary duty the task of sniffing out which boxes and items of fur
niture and general cubbyholes were being used to hide each household’s booze. He loved his work and I am willing to believe that he was extremely good at it, but there is a definite lack of variety in stories which all begin with finding bottles and all end with dropping strangers’ ornaments and then passing out in a van.
“Do you see what I mean, though, Bobby? That if there was this kind of a thing in the air, everywhere . . . there isn’t, but if there was . . . anyway—we drink it. That’s the thing. We look after it. Inside.”
“I looked after thin—”
“It’s like being a nun . . . no, like a painter, like that, the man—you know—tiger, tiger . . . —him . . . Blake. That’s the man. It’s like Blake.”
I’m flagging and Bobby can smell it—I can tell he’s preparing to wallow off into some saga involving an heirloom dinner service and an unwitting balcony, but I have no more strength to prevent him.
I have spent all evening being cheery and unexpectant and I am exhausted. I am waiting to meet Robert and he is not here. He has been not here for a fortnight, ever since he bolted that morning—maybe running away from me and not towards his surgery—and I have called his number, which I made him write down for me, and I have listened to his answering machine and I have not left a message after his tone, because I don’t know what to say. I have called to hear his voice, I have called to try and pick a meaning from it, I have called to guess if he is there and waiting, screening me out.
Paradise Page 8
