Paradise

by A. L. Kennedy

  “I need a drink.”

  “We’ll have a drink.”

  “I need a drink now.”

  “We’ll have a shower and then we’ll go out for a drink.”

  “I don’t need a shower. I need a drink.”

  In our miniature hotel room, I listen to Robert shower and examine the flowers: lampshades with flowers, cushions with flowers, framed flower prints. The wallpaper heaves with petals—giant, predatory orchids that lurk above the tulip-covered fitments and menace the vine-draped curtains and creep towards the carpet and its slaughterhouse of buds. I couldn’t sleep here even if I wanted to.

  Still, I lie on the bed anyway. It’s been distressed by some kind of prior activity, but that’s a good thing, because the naked sheets we’ve left ourselves are white: just a plain and empty, godless, ordinary white.

  Swaying in a way that is mainly soothing, I begin to get undressed, because I’m aware that my joints are stiffer than they should be, that they itch, and that I possibly should find out why. I notice a gentle rise of dust when I brush my arms, take down my jeans, a powdery haze against the inside of my navy blouse. It’s there on my underwear, too—my skin is shedding. I’m casting off one whole layer of what is me with maybe more to follow, who can say.

  This revelation makes the itching worse, although I shouldn’t scratch for fear of wearing me away.

  But the itch is bad.

  So I fingertip softly down my shins, rubbing gently, and watch another shower of Hannah Luckraft drift off towards the vegetative writhing on the floor.

  “Ho, I thought you wanted a drink.” Robert stands at the foot of the bed, limbs mildly damp, forefingers tucked in the waistband of his boxer shorts. “But we could wait, though.” One hand makes the predictable, usual dip, tugs out his rigid cock, and then allows himself a ruminative wank.

  Which means whisky—we must have been into the whisky to get him like that. Hard in a moment, or barely breathing: it can take him either way—in this case, very hard and very proud of it. Splay-footed and letting his stomach jut and holding his favourite thing in all the world: the tallest two-year-old you’ll ever meet. “Fancy it?” The whisky makes this rhetorical and sets him on the bed beside me, still wanking, semi-automatically. His free hand reaches for me, thumbs me open like a book, a little clumsy. “Or d’you want a drink? A wee drink of Robert before we go? Afore ye go?” He giggles and I feel his fingernail as he tries to unlock his way in.

  But I’m dry. Never mind the need that’s vaguely twitching into place—my tongue and my throat and my skin and my eyeballs and everywhere, I’m dry.

  “Whatsamatter?” He presses in from another angle, jigs at me with his thumb.

  It’s the speed, or whatever he’s fed me—always leaves me like a fucking iguana on a grill. I might be halfway normal by tomorrow, if then.

  He works on his shaft with a little more passion and studies my face as if I am far away and perhaps unfamiliar. “Hm?”

  “It’s the pills.”

  But Robert’s forgotten both the question and the answer and simply kneels up, frowning, flushing. His breathing keeps pace with his fist. And I do want this: the small, pained moment when he comes, when it’s warm across my stomach, a light touch against my side, spilling. And I do want his hand, warmer, fingers spread, palming it over my waist and down, smearing my breasts, wiping the last of it under my hair at the back of my neck. And I do want this stain of him on me, tight and silvered, something improper to please my aching skin, and I smile at him as we jar and stammer back into our clothes, recall our thirst, and he also smiles at me, only now I’ve caught his distance, been infected, so that it seems he’s receding from me, the room elongating to keep us beyond our reach.

  “Well.” His voice slightly distorted in the elastic air. “You said you need a drink. Will we go and get one?”

  “Yes.”

  For some reason I didn’t entirely hear myself when I said that, so I try again. “Yes.” A drink being the very thing to fix us up, have us 100 per cent again and in our correct dimensions. “Yes.” Tequila, I think. Tequila will sort me.

  Or white rum. A single absinthe, if they have some, just for a touch of class. “We should go and get a drink.” And then I’ll settle into something gentle, a mild flow of wine.

  What you want for a quality outing is a good sense of composition: when to climb steadily with a Lagavulin, or a Longrow, a Balvenie, when to take on convincing proof, when to level off with, say, a Merlot and when to risk the exotic: a Gammel Dansk, a Karpi, a Rawhide, a questch, an old Coca-Cola bottle full of colourless blindness and joy. It’s a knack, building a night.

  Robert gives up on his shoelaces and walks over, takes my arm and then coories himself in behind me, rocks his hand at the back of my neck. “Are you ready? Are you ready to be out with me? I want you out with me. So you can stand by the bar and I’ll take my first sip and I’ll look at you, I’ll look right at you and we’ll both know you’ve my spunk all over you—take that first sip and swallow it and we’ll both know. We’ll both drink and we’ll both know.”

  I lean against him, concentrating. “Okay.” First I feel nothing beyond echoes and a clammy, panicked lack. “We’ll do that.” And then the real thing spikes in me at last, closes my eyes. “Yes. We will.” Tonight we’ll drink the way we always should.

  “So you’ll remember the good things I do for you. So you’ll see. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you. I’ll make you forget every fucker but me.” He checks his watch. “Forty-one hours and thirteen minutes left.”

  Our first sip is round the corner in Marylebone High Street and it kisses our blood, illuminates—just at the good time, before the evening starts, when the sky is folding down to dusk outside and will keep us cosy and here we have space (the right amount of space) and quiet to let the sweet rush of spirits lift us, race our hearts. We stand and face the optics, side by side, no touching, and we could scream our lungs raw, we could break every bottle in here and eat the glass, we could run outside and keep on running and no power created could catch us, we could fuck on the counter naked till the wood burns through and the beauty of us makes the barman mad—we could do anything, but we only turn and see each other, see our love and take the second sip.

  Leading to Goodge Street and no bloody room. More tequila. So tight that you have to shout, everyone shouting. Little bastard with a cheap cigar makes a hole in my sleeve. Little bastard. Robert doesn’t mind, though. He’s red drunk—anyone would say so—crimson drunk, alight. You could read by him. If you had a book. I don’t have a book. He doesn’t have a book. I kiss his hand because he has great hands and he tastes of cunt and beer. I would wish to kiss his other hand but he won’t let me. Little bastard.

  Frith Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, back a street, another, the place we were in before, then the other place, Frith Street.

  This nice. Really. I think so.Thinso.

  We should joina club, then this would be easy, we’d be in our club for duration and drink, because I don’like to walk too much, you know? Bad for you.

  The people in here, they are so fucking ugly. Fucking ugly. Fucking ugly. I can say that all night. You can’stopme. Fucking ugly. Fuckinugly. Fuckinugly. You—you’re the most fucking ugly. Shit-faced fucker.

  Staystreet. Staceystreet. You’re fuckinpissed. Can’take your drink. Sad.

  Sad

  Sad

  Sad

  Shit-faced inthe gantry mirror. Own mother wouldn’tknow. Sad.

  I love my own mother.

  Robert. Nice hug with him wouldbegood. Lovely. Sweats like fuck, love that. Salt. Fuckhesgot nice hair. Fantastic hair. Bit grey enough grey right amount tellanyone great hair. Thisthe house? Issit? Party? Good. Lovely hair. Makesyo wantcry. Great.

  “I didn’t say, I didn’t do anything.”

  “You were sucking him off.”

  “What?”

  “You would have been.”

  “What? Me? I was behaving badly?
What the fuck were you doing?”

  “Playing footsie with him for a fucking hour. Who was he anyway, d’you even know?”

  “Was I the one who got thrown out?”

  “You’re just . . . You are just . . .”

  “Was the one, was the, was I the one who got thrown out?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Was I the one who—”

  “Fuck off.”

  “I wasn’t the one.”

  “Fuck off !”

  Back of a chinese restaurant—lane full of grease, everything grease and that thick taste, chemical, and I’m trying to piss and not to fall, and not to get dirty and I can’t tell what’s happening, what’s gettng wet. Jeans are a problem.

  Somewhere this bastard cunt is singing, same four notes, again and again, same four and aiming at me, wanting to kill me with it, wanting me fucking dead.

  Robert supposed to be looking out. But he’s not, not looking out, he’s pissing, too, against a skip, so he’s not looking out and I’ve started now and so I can’t stand, can’t hide, anyone could could walk by. Anyone.

  “Fucker.”

  “You were all over him.”

  “You’re off your fucking head.”

  “Should have just left you to it.”

  “Always the same.”

  “Yes. You are.”

  Sweeping machines going over cobbles, dark smear dragged along behind them and two bands of cleanliness. Gritty light. Bedfordbury. Another day starting, very pushy, when we haven’t quite done with the last.

  Big, quiet ache, above a rattle of emptying bins, vertigo under your feet. The city peering at you—it gets you in the morning, sees too much, that’s why you should stay inside.

  We sit on the steps of St. Martin’s.

  We are only tired. We have beds we will go to in a while. The men over there, they don’t have beds. They are unfortunate.

  We wouldn’t take a drink from them if they offered. We don’t favour lager and that’s all they’ve got. We are not the same as them. We would like to point out that the way we appear is a complete misunderstanding.

  “This is more like it.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  The Natural History Museum swims around me and then halts, jumps into place, sticky with children and throbbing in time to my pulse. This was Robert’s suggestion—to have a break, some culture. But the entrance hall alarmed us both, the scream of height inside it and the threatening stairs, the endless, inquisitive din of feet and lips and bickering families. So we’ve come to hide in here with the stuffed birds, because they are unpopular and quiet.

  Still, Robert likes museums, he is keen to show enthusiasm and take part. “That’s . . .” He frowns at a high, wide shrub infested with tiny corpses and trapped behind glass. Christ knows how many artificial eyes fail to blink at him, “That’s . . .” while he searches for a word that could describe them.

  “Dead. That’s . . . all dead. Everything in here is dead.”

  A nasty sleep mugged us back at the hotel and now there are only twenty-one hours and eight minutes—give or take—before we go home.

  Robert hisses out a sigh between his teeth and we wander on. Up ahead there is a case of swans—mother, father, children, lumpily preserved—evidence of some dreadful accident. “Oh God, will you look?” Or just a wholesale slaughter, gleefully displayed.

  “At what?” Robert’s forcing a heat now. “Well?” His colour high, mouth tightening round the start of an argument, liking it there.

  “The swans.” Which I try to say gently, as if it is just a remark, because I am hung-over in a way that makes me slow and so I have been unable to realise in time that he is hung-over in a way that makes him furious.

  “So what’s wrong with them? Jesus Christ, all I wanted was a little bit of peace. You’ve done nothing but fucking bitch since we came in.”

  “I don’t mind being here.”

  “Oh, fantastic—thanks for your fucking unreserved support. Again. And last night . . .” He can’t remember last night any more than I can,

  “I thought we had a nice time last night.” I speak softly, so that he can, too.

  But it doesn’t work. “You fucking would.” He is irreversible. “A nice time . . .” There’s nothing in him that I can coax round, even argue with. The best of his head is asleep, or still pissed, and I’ve been left with this— an angry no one. “A nice time.” Dropping his head and flinching, then constructing his stare, hoping I’ll meet it, wanting to hurt himself with that.

  “Robert, what the fuck is wrong with you?” And this time I am not speaking softly, because there is no point and he is changing the subject to something which makes no sense.

  “You want me to believe it was the pills . . .” He will say whatever strikes him now, whatever will hurt.

  “The pills?”

  So it is easy for him to step in close beside me and grind out, “You never had a dry cunt in your life. But now you do with me,” before he ducks back, heads for the next room, feet slightly baffled by each step.

  I intend to follow, to yell and make him ashamed, but he has made me ashamed first, he has frightened me with nonsense, made my stomach scared. I have to go back to the entrance, find the toilet and be sick.

  When I leave the museum I start to walk north, in no hurry: I don’t much want to be in the hotel again, not yet—there’s too much Robert there. The breeze is not unkind and follows me, nudging my back, as I head for Hyde Park and its strangely naked green, the flat reach of somewhere which is almost country, which almost smells of spring. I avoid the paths and wish the grass more uneven, feel the lack of scrub and rocks. Down at the lake, swans are begging in huddles, removed from their animal selves, undignified.

  Beyond the perimeter, two armoured cars are heading towards Marble Arch. They’re painted grey and have PRESS stencilled on them in white and they smell of being far away and death—here, they don’t fit. They’re part of the wrong war for London: they should be open-topped, khaki, full of young chaps with tin helmets and overcoats, driving too fast and grinning out at arm-in-arm uniformed women, sandbags and comical signs left in chalk to raise morale. They should be from the place that I learned about with Simon: the one that showed how good we were born to be. The one in The Wooden Horse and 633 Squadron and The Desert Rats and all of the other dreams where all of the proper humans were busy and forthright and brave and there was maybe a little sadness, but in the end things would be fine, because we were right, we were in the right. We loved that war.

  Not that love is my strong point. And I could do without thinking of Simon, or war, or bombs, or shelters, or any fucker not myself.

  Myself. No one understands that. No one feels it. I am enough to make me miserable. I am too much to bear. Other people get help, they’re supported, they have obvious injuries. Other people don’t have to be me.

  And sometimes I am unavoidable, so this is when I have to raise my blood sugar, line my stomach and get a grip. Because I have to admit that quite often I don’t need sympathy, only a spot of basic maintenance and then chemical intervention.

  Swallowed back into the city, I pick out a café and sit, watch a girl make me a stale chicken sandwich and deliver it with an espresso, a half-litre bottle of water and a bill for a three-course meal. The water says it is best before 2027. Ordinarily I don’t like to drink things which are intended to last that long.

  But I rehydrate with it anyway, and perk myself up with the coffee and gag the chicken down while the apparently drugged waitress lays out tiny medical-looking trays full of dreadful objects intended to be tapas and to give everybody a dash of Hispanic romance. Above the tapas area is a tired neon sign that should read

  MAY WE

  HELP YOU?

  but that actually reads

  MAY

  HELP

  I pay the waitress more money than either of us is worth and get on my way.

  How I find the church, I’m not too certain. It’
s past two and I’ve been thirsty in Lancaster Gate and then again in Baker Street and someone with Robert’s shoulders was in the first pub and somebody with his hair was in the next and men who have some trick of him, a style of walking, a similar shirt: they’ve tired me now for hours and driven me in here, a narrow-fronted chapel that opens, deep and dim off the crook of the street.

  I’d expected calm and these final pews are, indeed, empty and undisturbed, but the altar is a murmuring scramble of school uniforms and musical instruments. Slowly a kind of tune, impossible to identify, limps out from the small musicians while three adult women—I presume teachers— stand among the rest of their child congregation and mime inexplicable actions with exemplary emphasis. Their charges echo them: cradling, plaiting, engraving, stabbing, blowing glass: and all the time mouthing something which barely reaches me, a drifting, dissipating song.

  One verse goes badly and is apparently repeated twice while I resist the urge to kneel, to sink and curl myself out of anyone’s sight, tent my hands together as if I can still pray.

  The children now rearrange themselves, earnest, and take it in turns to deliver small readings from a lectern. The content escapes me beyond the occasional word—bread, wine, garden, betrayed, forsaken, stripped.

  I did this once. I read. I walked to the front of the school hall and took my place in the little line, stretched my spine until it tickled so I’d be tall enough to hold the holiness I could feel pouring, rolling in. “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.” And my voice floated out, sweet from my throat. “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.” The complications of it and the melody and the meaning that I couldn’t grip, except that it was so fine and shining and a comfort. “And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.”