Paradise

by A. L. Kennedy

  The Parson sets down his glass and tries to force a particularly wounded expression on me, which I pre-empt by looking at Maurice instead. This doesn’t help, though, because Maurice seems equally upset, perhaps more so.

  “He was a priest.”

  “What?”

  Maurice murmurs at me again, “He was a priest.” Suddenly acting as if the Parson is the biggest pal he’s ever had, when they do nothing but snipe at each other, then go into huffs.

  “He was a priest?”

  Their shoulders are almost touching in a display of distressed affection. It wouldn’t surprise me, if they started to hold hands, or weep. Men—always showing off their feelings.

  “You were really a . . . ? that whole . . . ?”

  They’re being best pals at me, buddies: all faked nobility and comradeship under fire. With me cast as the bitch who’s firing.

  “You’re not pissing about? You mean you really were . . . ?”

  The pair of them dripping with pained silence and giving theatrical flinches.

  “Well, that’s . . . your own business . . . Good for you, though. Sorry I didn’t know before. Not that it would have altered . . . Good for you.”

  Robert is smirking above his pint.

  And that’s annoying. It’s more annoying than the certainty that I’ll have to give in: make the first move and go and speak to him, or else he’ll just keep on, clinging there like a niggling whelk. Anyway, I can’t stay where I am, because everyone here’s getting much too highly strung “You . . . you carry on with your discussion, okay then? Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  I manage a casual stroll and attempt another mouthful of the orange, but realise it smells of bile.

  “Robert.”

  “Hannah.”

  “You’re very quiet.”

  “So are you.”

  In the far background the parson has started in again and Old Margaret is asking someone for a light, prior to asking them for a cigarette, and Thomas the surly barman does surly barman things with his disreputable cleaning cloth and every part of this is not important. Buildings exploding in other countries are not important: this season’s colour of car and moral dilemmas and new diseases and strip cartoons and children dying and flavours of pasta sauces and the rule of law—they are not important. We are what counts. We are the most that I can think about.

  “I’m back.”

  “I see that.” He nibbles at his beer. “Yes. There you are.”

  “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “Yes. There you are.”

  We stare straight ahead, study Thomas as if he were a map and murmur to the blank air like rendezvousing spies.

  “They just sent me away, Robert, packed me off—I couldn’t stop them. I was ill.”

  Pointing out that Robert himself went off to Canada and gave me no warning beforehand and left me in limbo for weeks—well, I can’t do that, because it’s true and will therefore cause offence and may lead on to further truths and very few of them won’t hurt us.

  “Robert?”

  I risk pressing my arm against his and he doesn’t withdraw, doesn’t do anything beyond feeling the way I know which, for a slow breath, means I have to close my eyes.

  “Robert.”

  He puts down his glass. “Did I say you could go?”

  “That isn’t—”

  “Did I say you could go?”

  I have no idea what he wants this to mean. “No. You didn’t say I could go.” Beer and wine, the less-committed drinks, you can never be sure how they’ll take a person, and they’re clearly making Robert upset.

  “So?”

  “Robert, I—”

  “So what do you have to tell me?”

  “I don’t fucking know. What?”

  This almost makes him turn to me, connect, and he flushes at the lapse. “What do you have to tell me?”

  I can’t think he has any meaningful suspicions, so a confession can’t be what he wants. The message I left said I’d be in a clinic, in treatment, under medical supervision—nothing to suggest I might fuck strangers.

  One stranger.

  Only one that qualifies.

  But Mr. Robert Gardener does not know anything about that.

  But Mr. Robert Gardener could guess.

  “Robert, what do you want me to say?”

  “If you don’t know . . .” He stretches, rolls his neck, slaps both his hands on the edge of the bar. “Look, I really need to get out of here.”

  “Well, we could—”

  “By myself.” Then he coughs, waits, fumbles in his pockets purposelessly, smoothes his hair.

  “Robert, I’m sorry.”

  “What?” His shoulders beginning the shift to me and his neck following, his frown: an undefined accusation in everything.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He tilts his head, allows my look to reach his. “What did you say?” There’s no heat in his eyes, only concentration.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re what?” Another tilt.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The solemn mouth ticks, flickers, suggests a softness. “Once more for luck.”

  “I. Am. Sorry.” I reach with my left hand and take his right forefinger, wrap it in my fist, as tight and as Freudian a fit as I can make it. “And. You. Are. A total bastard.”

  “Well, what did you expect?”

  Which is the trouble with being the way that we are—what we expect. As drinkers, we anticipate the worst, this is our self-defence. We let little fears and disappointments gnaw us in advance; an inoculation against the full-blown griefs we know we’ll suffer later. As a result, we wear ourselves down, grow tired and forgetful, which means there’ll always be a certain number of incoming disasters which will take us wholly by surprise. And then there are points when we simply relax and trust and are, once again, overwhelmed by events.

  I’d become used to spending pleasant times with Robert—I’d come to regard them as guaranteed—which was really an obvious indication that I should expect those times to stop. But I didn’t. Because there are other things in my life that I also expect and enjoy and they lower my guard.

  Put it this way—I’m a drinker and drinkers are permeable, absorbent. So when I sit next to a man with (for example) a cockney accent, it may well be that I will catch his way of speaking and, as we make ourselves acquainted, he may ask me where I’m from and imagine I’m going to say Stepney, or Brick Lane, or some other Londonish place and then, quite unreasonably, he may get annoyed and disdainful when I say I grew up somewhere not far from Aberdeen. He may act as if I have deceived him, although this has not been my aim, and my behaviour has been unremarkable. It’s an essential of our species to be accommodating, part of whatever crowd has been provided: obstreperous in jumble sales, plaintive among policemen, aroused in one specific dentist’s chair. And then, once we’ve gone to the trouble of adjusting, why not keep hold of this or that stylish trait? It’s not as if we’re stealing—more like multiplying attributes: they stay with the original owner, but we get to play with them as well. Two of my laughs belong to a physics teacher, the way I throw my holdall into cars harks back to a film I saw once, something to do with desert highways. If we’re honest, what other reason does anyone have for wasting their money on cinema trips? We go to pick up characteristics, to renovate our personalities with cladding and patches we’ve filched from the screen.

  Nobody is complete—we all need topping up. Alcohol can add a little, but mainly it enlarges what’s already there. Environmental factors, traumas, levels of income and training, they can shape me: I can pick and choose what I borrow and what I assimilate. But, for the drinker, there are better possibilities than this. What I wait for are those beautiful, uncommon chances to truly search another human being and be truly searched by them, to shift shapes in each other’s company. Accents and laughs are superficial, unsatisfying: they’re only where the process starts, as you sink down and grin through the meat of a diffe
rent life. I’ve heard it said that drinkers are uncaring, that we don’t bond, but nothing could be more untrue. I can be closer to you—more of you—in an hour than any teetotaller would be if they kept you drugged and naked in their basement for a month: if they ate your brain.

  If you and I were to be drunk together, then osmosis would give way to metamorphosis, to more and more permanent change. If you and I were drunk together often we might occasionally seem indistinguishable, two liquids blended in one. If, beyond that, we were in love—well, you can guess how it would be. Too many days of having your partner swallow down your guilts and like your likes and speak out the heart of your sentences: of understanding without question what you both will do and how and the way you will feel about everything throughout; of losing the line between your skins, your dreams, your heats—this can make you believe you will never be alone, never resubjected to the usual forces and natural laws. You will assume you are free of such things and safe in your own small Eden. You will be wrong, but you will still expect it. You will still hurt when it’s gone.

  So the very average kiss I exchanged with Robert in the bar that afternoon gave me a headache at once. When our lips touched they were neutral: nothing beyond his sealed presence, not even hostility, only dumb flesh. We tasted of my past being torn away, of denial and theft.

  And this wasn’t fair. I had inadequate company to cheer me in my glass and I was trying to stay sober and he was dragging me awfully close to being depressed. I’d intended to stay and be happy about my return, blur myself along into a mellow evening and an active, amnesiac night, but now the plans were spoiled. This left me with a single option: to give Robert a kiss even blander than the dab he’d offered me and then head home—to my original home, the one where my parents live.

  There were no other choices, not any more. I had that particular sadness which combines a need for family and nostalgia with a knowledge that indulging it will only make matters much worse.

  Somewhere under my heart, I knew that much worse would be what I deserved.

  My father once took me to the circus. My mother disapproved and, as yet, there was no Simon, so just the two of us went down past the abandoned bandstand to the far corner of the green where a huddle of caravans and straw heaps and what seemed—even to me—quite a small big top all indicated the circus had arrived.

  I pretend to remember a small parade before that—one elephant, a nasty clown on stilts, cheaply painted lorries with sour exhausts—but truly I think there was nothing like that, only my need for it. The scenes are unclear: the slide of hooves along our street too disconnected from the thought of zebras.

  I did go to the show, though, and I can call up the heavy, sweating air, sagged between the canvas and the cold, odd lights, the fascinating quantity of sawdust—more than I’d ever seen in a butcher’s shop—and here were live animals, jolting through their stressed little party pieces before maybe the sawdust claimed them and they turned into meat. But that’s as much as I recall.

  It was a long time ago and I was extremely young, but that isn’t why I have such trouble bringing it to mind. I’m unwilling to see the tired, dull, real circus, because it degrades the much lovelier one I have, perhaps always, kept inside my head.

  Everyone goes through a circus phase, of course: the wonderful horror of watching adults behave insanely, the mysterious charge of their costumes, their skin, and all those compounded risks. You can run through the list of charms yourself: the terror of clowns, the unsettling allure of whips and glitter, your identification with those harried and overly willing creatures, the tang of unreasonable display.

  They still often televised this perversity when I was a girl and then there was that film with Jimmy Stewart and Charlton Heston—lots of films, in fact, with jealous lovers and wicked ringmasters and anthropomorphic chimps—people knew about circuses—they were around. And children were supposed to like them and I was a child. But my circus, the one True Circus, I never disclosed: because it had nothing to do with all that.

  In my circus, the band plays always: banjos and flat trumpets, out-of-kilter violins, twisted accordions, steam organs and bad, unresonant drums: they grind out in limping waltz time and make the air giddy, gamy with sweat and topple me into the place where there are only circus people, sideshow people, my own people. They have parts that are missing, or parts that are extra in sly and unspeakable ways. They lack propriety, love to exhibit, often practise after-hours. They have marvellous, shocking skills which are not useful anywhere, not anywhere without an audience. Their pasts and their futures are sheened with misfortunes, with an enforced appetite for pain. Their damp and close and everlasting present stiffens with blood on demand. They can read strangers, curse them, work them into helplessness. They are freaks. They are monsters. They are my natural family.

  Even so young, I understood that, and hand-holding back to our home with my father I knew that I hadn’t seen the True Circus.

  “Was that all right, then?”

  “Yes.” I leaned against my father’s arm and felt him fret. “But we wouldn’t have to go again. It would be the same.”

  “And we wouldn’t like that.”

  “No.”

  “Shame your mother didn’t come.”

  “But she wouldn’t like it.”

  “No. Too noisy.” He had flinched in his seat at every whip crack and play-explosion.

  I had sat very near him to lend support, while I felt guilty for not being frightened and for searching out signs of my other home. “Noisy. Yes. Can we have milk?” My father’s hot milk was the best, he made it as if he was doing magic: by the time it arrived, the taste was almost irrelevant, but very fine.

  “Isn’t it too warm for milk?”

  “Not now.”

  “Well, then we’ll have milk.” We had come to the end of the green. “We don’t have to say anything about this—just that it was fine. Don’t want your mother upset about the animals and noises. Is that all right?”

  And it was quite all right and True Circus relaxed its grip on me and allowed us back into our house and Father fussed about his saucepan in the kitchen, adding his cinnamon and vanilla and then poured me half a mug of milk—in case I spilled it—and then didn’t drink his own, only settled in his chair and tilted up his chin when my mother came in and stood behind him. This let her stroke his forehead with her hands, over and over and over. When I was finished drinking, I went upstairs to brush my teeth and left them together there: him with his eyes shut and smiling and my mother smoothing back his hair.

  In bed after that, I was full of circus music and the hope there’d be a place among the monsters, waiting ready for me.

  Of course, it took many more years before I could abandon my domestic family and start looking for the freak show where I’d be a better fit. It was a gradual process. For instance, I don’t know when I stopped wanting to think of my parents—that is, when they became too much to bear. By the time I was nineteen or twenty, they were already difficult— changed from the human beings I’ve known longest to proofs of discomforts and injuries I’ve inflicted and the predictable lack of mercy I have taught. Now when we meet we are not people: only unfortunate reminders, bodies of bad evidence. The money they kept on lending me, the money that I took, the falling asleep with my face in the Sunday lunch, the endless trail of lies and breakages and stains and the dirt and the damp and the unnamed disease of myself, at large in their house, more than naked when they saw me, more than obscene, stinking of animal will and sawdust.

  And I do feel remorse for every sin. Inside, I am mostly built out of remorse, but no one can manage the weight of that, not constantly. It has to be put away, sent out of mind, because anything else would be stifling, perhaps suicidal. So the idea of my mother and father has to be strictly controlled for the sake of my health. I will cast up little childhood scenes, seek out the clean and early times and dream above them nicely, but beyond that, I’m taking no risks.

  Because even o
ne unwary moment might summon up something awful, like the sight of my mother bending down and picking up tiny parts of a smashed lamp and the fine curl in her hair and the way that she wears a cardigan draped around her shoulders sometimes, because she has the poise to look lovely like that, and even her bending is feminine, delicate, and the only reason she has to be doing this is me. I am the one who broke the lamp, I am the one who threw a glass at it, because I was angry, because I was drunk, because I wanted to throw something at her—a tumbler at her—and this made such a falling weakness in me that I aimed for the lamp and hated her more and loved her more and I would cry if she didn’t look so tender, if she didn’t seem to be exactly the person I should always protect from the scenes of my crimes. I would cry if she wasn’t making me a monster.

  And no one would want to see that, not ever: most of all not if they knew that it was true.

  Although it isn’t a question of preference any more—when these things are once woken they stay that way.

  So right now I am concentrating on my mother, holding fast to the way that she is in front of me, at her doorstep, where she is making herself be pleased to see me. I had no reason to suspect that she would do this and I am, therefore, unexpectedly fighting for breath, straining against the pressure of her kindness. She glances a moment too long at the raw line in my eyebrow, the settling scar of my journey to Clear Spring, and then darts me glances and tiny, rushing smiles as she brings me inside and her hand whispers down my arm, desperate and tender. Any more of this and she’ll send me entirely cartoon. She ushers me into the living room where a woman sits: somebody I don’t know.

  “Mrs. Anderson, this is my daughter—a surprise visit.” My mother saying this, as if it is the pleasant kind of surprise, even approaching a special occasion: overplaying the whole thing with a ghastly nervousness. She smiles at me again with the silent, huge request that I should be altered for the better and not disgrace her, that I should join her in thinking wish-fully till I leave. It cannot be true that less than a fortnight away in dubious treatment can have created a new daughter, a girl she can trust. But this is what she wants. I have no chance to form an expression in reply, because she is already bustling to the kitchen with far too much gaiety.