“I washed my face for a long time and then I combed my hair and then I went and got dressed. But when I came out of my room again, there was a policewoman there, waiting. She must have been a very quiet person, I hadn’t heard her on the stairs. What she said . . . it was some list of words that didn’t mean anything and she was far too polite. Nobody is polite to you, not when you’re seventeen, not unless there’s a room downstairs that you can’t go into and your father has been kneeling on the hallway floor beside the front door, but a policeman is helping him up now and studying him, as if he is this . . . something strange, infectious. Then the policeman looks at you and you’re infectious, too. When all you’ve done is wake up in this house and be this son.
“I saw my father’s face when he stood, but he wasn’t inside it, not anywhere near. Then they took him out. My mother, I didn’t see. I never got to see her. They didn’t let me. I went to bed the night before and in the morning she was gone.
“Except I knew that wasn’t right, wasn’t the explanation. I knew what he’d done.”
Then Robert was still and quiet and I almost thought that he was sleeping, but when I shifted against him, stroked his arm, he started again: “I couldn’t tell them much. But he admitted all of it, so they didn’t have much use for me. I remember that I was in court, but not why. I have a feeling that I was not significant.
“They weren’t sure of what to do with me—not there, or anywhere else after that. No one knew where to put me . . . so I got moved around. But I kept up studying. That was fine. That was just the same. The school said that I needn’t, but I took all the exams at the right time. I did very well. I was a good boy, a good pupil. And then I could go away and be a student, study more. So that’s what I did. I had a lot of money. Inherited.”
He moved until he was lying with his face pressed into my chest, until I could rock him, close my hands behind his head, wind my legs against his and catch him, keep him from falling.
When he spoke again, he sounded younger and his consonants were blurred. “He wanted me to visit him in prison. I refused. He wrote for a while and I didn’t answer and then he stopped. Lack of forgiveness, they said it would hurt me—I didn’t say anything, but I thought they could all go and fuck themselves, that’s what I thought. Of course, he’s out now. But he can’t find me. I changed my name—Robert Gardener, that’s what I picked.”
And I rock him and I tell him, “That’s what I picked, too.” And I hear it sound irrelevant.
“I’m a good boy.”
“That’s right.” Both of us mumbling, because we want to be asleep, in a dream where this will come and trouble us, but then move on.
“I have to let you know.”
“That’s right.” When we’re rested, we’ll make love. It will help us get away from this, sometimes that’s what it’s for. “That’s right.” We’ll be together. And he won’t talk any more.
“No.” A fidget of movement through him. “I have to let you know.”
“Let me know what?”
“I have a wife. She lives with my daughter. I have a wife.”
“Is that a problem?”
He is still for a while, but the silence is only reflective, not tense. “No. It’s not a problem.”
“Then that’s all right.”
“No, I don’t think it’s a problem.”
“Fine.”
“But I thought you should know.”
“And now I do. So that’s okay.”
And, because it’s okay, but we need to leave here very much, have had enough, must start at once—we’re going to work ourselves awake, we’re going to strip down to distractions, we’re going to be hands and tongues and fucking, running ourselves under salt. We’re going to bruise and bite until the round wear of him in me, the drag of me caught around him, can erase us, let us seem anonymous.
IX
Getting a job—eventually, it’s unavoidable. You have neglected to save savings, your position regarding state benefits is obscure, no secretive great-aunts have left you their Chilean vineyards and estates and so there are no other choices: you have to work.
And fit yourself into the shape of that long, sad stare you first discovered at seventeen, out of school and with a young thirst to support. The stare draws over you, cold and tight, whenever you peer at the small ads in tobacconists’ windows and the columns of unwholesome and also entirely unreachable prospects offered in newspapers under Employment and the tidy, depressing postcards in the cheapskate agencies and the multiply renamed and euphemised places which I will only ever call labour exchanges, because that speaks of dignity and the Jane Eyre/Ealing Comedy/even Henry James types of position that might lead to adventure and romance, or at least to excitement and occult shocks.
Not that you really believe you might ever get lucky and find a job—and as soon as you even consider this, your face changes, you start looking unemployed: unemployable: long-term. Your transformation is completed by the time your eyes have edged across to read the offered rates of pay and then winced back. You add up the stated hours again and think that you don’t want to spend forty in a week, or thirty-five in a week, or to-be-arranged-plus-overtime in a week, or actually any time in a week doing something that’s appalling, but required of you by strangers. You have no applicable skills, but you know what you won’t stand for.
And, worse, this bears no relation to those ambitions you once chose, the ones you’re still prepared for—it means you’ll never be a gold panner, a teacher, or an archaeologist, you’ll never clown in the True Circus of your heart. Your future is irretrievable, because the careers you would like involve qualifications, training, a decision on your part to be responsible and adult. The only vacancies you could fill will amount to daily demonstrations of your uselessness.
You are now approaching forty and have already spent far too long washing underwear in a theatre, stacking shelves, cleaning rental power tools—which are, I would mention, often returned in revolting states. You have slotted together grids of doubtful purpose, you have folded free knitting and/or sewing patterns into women’s magazines, you have sorted potatoes (for three grotesque hours), you have telephoned telephone owners to tell them about their telephones and you have spent one extremely long weekend in a hotel conference suite, asking people what they found most pleasing about bags of crisps. Every prior experience proves it— there is no point to you.
At least at the end of the crisp job, I got to take some home. But selling cardboard was a godsend: flexible and satisfying in a way that involved no pressure at any stage, because—after all—what sane person could possibly care about who might be buying how many of which kind of box. The job actually managed to be more trivial than me, which seemed to produce this Zen glow across my better days and enabled me to lie my head off in a consistent, promotional manner with hardly a trace of nauseous side effects.
At the moment, though, there’s nothing doing: not in cardboard. Nobody wants me any more and yet, for the usual reasons, I continue to want cash. So, on a sodden Tuesday lunchtime, I’m forced to admit I’ve been driven to make the drinker’s most conventional mistake. I’ve started working in a bar.
“. . . and a peach schnapps . . . and d’you have peanuts?”
“We have dry-roasted, roasted and beer nuts. Or cashews.” I know he doesn’t have the class to buy cashews.
I also know that we both, my customer and I, have no idea what beer nuts are. We’ve tasted them, so we’re quite sure they contain antiseptic, but we haven’t given them much further thought. Not until this week, when I discovered my job involves bearing beer nuts and similar horrors perpetually in mind. I also have to wear this yellow T-shirt and this yelping smile and I also have to be able to say beer nuts as if those words are not offensive in every way and I also have to tolerate an order including one watermelon-flavoured Bacardi Breezer, two ginger ales and six whole packets of beer nuts and I also have to serve such a piss-poor excuse for a round without first picking
up an ashtray and beating it off the proud purchaser’s skull for successfully wasting everybody’s time.
“Thanks.” He thrusts across the filthy, student type of tenner with his filthy, student type of hand.
“Mm.” I reach into my special jar and give him back some hot, wet change, which he almost drops. He then shuffles his ginger pop and packets away to his lumpy friends who nod and grimace at each other merrily.
I only stop hating them, because I have to give a businessman a double Scotch. There is something about this man’s overly boyish goatee and his desperately amusing tie (set against a dark and ailing suit) that strongly suggests he is divorced and initially thought this a good idea, but now spends most of his lunch hours pretending to read in public places and hoping he can pick up girls. I feel him inspect me while I turn to pour his drink, his boneless little glances slithering here and there while I breathe in the scent of his whisky and love it as it deserves.
“Anything else?” I’m careful to say this so that the following unspoken phrase reads before I punch you in the throat rather than you dashing rascal, you—I get off at five o’clock.
I do, in fact, get off at five o’clock which means that I won’t have to suffer him when he scampers in again after work, dreaming he’ll meet someone pissed enough to fuck him.
Not that I’m so terribly annoyed with the businessman, per se, or anyone else, for that matter—it’s just this bar I despise. It used to be a bank and still has an air of mingled anxiety and gruelling financial prudence— somewhere, the pennies are still being cared for and the pounds are caring smugly for themselves. The furnishings are too modern, the lights are too bright and every glimmer of conviviality disappears at once into the height of the ceiling where it is shredded slowly by unnecessary fans. The punters are cackling, or braying, or showing each other electrical gadgets they’ve bought, or yelling about lap dancers, or the plans they have to deck their patios. If two or three hand grenades rolled by, I’d joyfully pull their pins, if only to stop the bastards breeding.
Although this isn’t completely the problem, either. It’s more that a lot of my customers aren’t drinking properly, aren’t even trying. And, then again, many of them are drinking quite a lot. And meanwhile, because it is good for me and because I promised myself and because I promised other people and because Robert is being supportive, I am, of course, not actually drinking myself. That is, I am taking liquids, but they do not contain alcohol. If I were drinking, I would show them how it’s done.
But I’m not.
So they don’t know me.
I am being underestimated on every side. And I find that grating— anyone would.
“What’s wrong?”
I am staring at the top of Robert’s arm.
“Hannah? What’s wrong?”
This is where men first grow old. Greying doesn’t matter, new lines at the eyes—these small changes can be helpful, improving, but there’s nothing to be done about the arms. From the shoulder to the elbow, gently, softly, you’ll find a delicacy settled in his skin, a minute loosening where it lies above the muscle, a loss of grip. Once this has come it isn’t going to leave him.
I didn’t intend to notice. “Nothing’s wrong, I’m fine.” And I am fine: only I’m thinking of ways he might go, reasons, and most of them don’t scare me and I can duck them, I can look the other way—but age and time, they’re another prime example of God’s slapstick: the body you’re just getting fond of when it rots, the loves that you can’t keep, the pratfall that always ends you, leaves you blinking up from the dust at your own mortality.
And I’ve been thinking about mortality more and more lately— another lovely side effect of keeping away from drink. So the last thing I need is to see it clouding Robert.
He stretches—apparently happy and at ease—shakes, rubs his wet hair with his fingers until it furrows and then stands. “You’re not fine. I can tell—I’m a dentist.” These days we take baths together or, more often, we watch each other soak, rub backs, admire the hot, clean infant heat when we step out and on to the tiles the way Robert just has. I swaddle him up in a towel, still playing at bath night, standing behind him and hugging my boy, licking the drops of water from his ear.
I close my eyes and make time leave us be. “I’m a bit . . . I feel a bit grey. Not for a reason.”
We’re in his flat. Before his confession, I’d never seen inside it—I now have a space in the bathroom cabinet and a drawer for my overnight clothes. Robert moved here when he left his wife, or she asked him to leave, and a sense of flight still lingers: the shelves and fitted units are mainly empty—even with my contributions added—there’s a gaggle of lonely cans in one kitchen cupboard and a lack of ornaments. Everything tastes of fresh starts and reinvention and vigorous, road-movie freedoms we have yet to explore. This is where we can choose whoever we might want to be, but never pick anyone else, only ourselves together. That must mean we’re the best we can imagine. I ought to be comfortable here as a matter of course and I frequently am.
“Well, if you feel grey . . .” He shrugs out of the towel and winks, secure in himself, reassuring, still in mainly good shape, and then eases into a dressing gown which is new enough to have that hotel frisson, an attractive neutrality. “We could laugh at the television.” We could be anywhere, planning anything.
In fact, we do as he suggests and amble on through to his living room where he keeps the white leather three-piece suite (reduced because of scuffing and small marks) and the oddly large TV set which shines up from the floor when we wake it—Robert keeps forgetting to buy a stand for it and doesn’t yet possess a table. At once our channel bleats and yammers into place, keeping us from news and other unwelcome intrusions.
“We’ve got people like Ah-Mozart there, Ah-Rachmaninov, Ah-Chopin—guide price £120, but bidding up from a pound.” A woman dressed like a minor teen singer is holding CDs in a fan, so that the camera can see them, while another woman, dressed like an older and workmanlike prostitute, waltzes behind her to “The Blue Danube” while pushing a complicated and empty pram. “Over forty-six hours of classical masterpieces. Look at that—Ah-Schumann, Ah-Beethoven and all starting from a pound, how can you beat it?” The pram prostitute smiles and skips in her too-tight suit, while teen singer’s unfettered breasts challenge her T-shirt and we’re shown that the pram has functioning brakes and real, revolving wheels, all in an atmosphere of captive hysteria.
This rarely fails to cheer us up—it is selling and suffering and hopeless tat, it is freaks talking gibberish, detaching from their brains, and trying to wheedle the other freaks and the mad and the sad and the long-term unemployed into 75p-per-minute phone calls that may gain them impulse-bought kitchen appliances of no possible earthly use, or very large, remaindered jewellery. It is ugly, insane and shameful and reminds us of life.
“Look at her—mutton dressed as Spam.”
“Would you pay a pound for that?” Robert nudging me, enjoying his favourite question.
“Oh, I’d pay two . . . even two pounds fifty. They’ve got Ah-Brahms and everything.”
“Forty-six hours . . .”
“Of classical masterpieces.”
“I wonder if they ever get to stop?”
Although, naturally, they show no sign of stopping, “Pete’s in at thirty pounds, Carol’s in at thirty-five pounds.” Calling the freaks by their first names to make them feel less alone. “All you twenty-five-pound bidders, you’re on the way out. Forty pounds would get this for you . . . Three times at twenty-eight . . . I’m not bringing the hammer down . . . Thirty pounds, thirty-two . . . I’m closing . . .”
Before a man in a plastic suit tries to explain a tiny, battery-powered chainsaw. Its blade extends just far enough to amputate string, small twigs, perhaps children’s fingers. The man’s hair, like everyone else’s in this purgatory of crap, suggests he has been quite recently burned at the stake.
“And if you don’t want it, what about your granny, or
an auntie, or your mum? . . . for only fifteen pounds. No need to struggle any more, no need for strength in those arms.” Out in the world the freaks are calling up and bidding, perhaps out of love for their grannies and aunties and mums, which is a warming thought.
We lean against each other, warm in any case, and Robert sips a modest glass of red. This doesn’t make me uneasy, because he deserves it: having to drill and hook at distressed mouths for most of the day, that’ll work up a thirst. Dentist: another job I wouldn’t take.
“Still grey?”
“No, not really.” My head is resting at his collarbone and I can hear the wine in him, the way it articulates his heartbeat, makes it sound more bright. I could almost go to sleep beside his soothing shine, if it weren’t for the jolt and nag of sober thinking: all the obvious misery of everything. When you catch some flaying headline, or a radio makes you listen to the latest death, the latest dreadful accident, young life blighted, blasphemous pain, when anyone just has to tell you anything—drink is supposed to deal with that.
I am delicate and the world is impossibly wrong, is unthinkable and I am not forewarned, forearmed, equipped. I cannot manage. If there was something useful I could do, I would—but there isn’t. So I drink.
So I drank.
And on all those other evenings, drink has trotted in and softened worries, charmed away internal repetitions of unpleasant facts and lifted my attitude those few vital degrees which prevent everybody from dragging their past behind them like a corpse, while bolting forward through a suicidal haze.
Now I have only my own body’s vindictive chemistry to keep myself on track and that isn’t enough, so I’m wedged between the TV and Robert, battling to hear anything over the din in my head.
He isn’t living with his wife, but he’s still married.
What does that mean?
Paradise Page 22
