Incredible Bodies

by Ian McGuire

  E was not tired at all, or perhaps she was, but the tiredness was trapped below so many other, better feelings that its tedious and plaintive cries could not be heard. The dinner had been great. Kidney’s friends were boozy and unconfined. They had cryptic nicknames for the waiters and told detailed and salacious anecdotes about people E had read about in the newspapers. When the discussion turned to pregnancy, they made it seem arty and exciting, as if giving birth was a project, a piece of work. And that was really, she thought, as it should be – children were works of art. They modified the world and made it more real. They were not, as Morris seemed so often to imply, an annoyance, a task, a burden, a thing to be got through or seen off. What an arsehole he could be sometimes, what a prick. The job which was supposed to change everything had really changed nothing, she realised – he still lived in a weird half-gravity of his own devising. The tenor had changed perhaps, a switch from moroseness to half-cocked levity. But he was no weightier, no more real than before. Bangor, she thought, that bastard Under-seel; would it ever end?

  E looked across at Kidney. He was wearing a white T-shirt and yellow sou’wester, he had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and his eyes were hooded against the smoke. His forehead was ridged and shiny in the restaurant’s warmth like the bed of a stream. He was smiling.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’m shattered.’

  Nick Kidney lived in a surprisingly ordinary house off Brick Lane.

  ‘I’m shocked,’ said E. ‘I was expecting a penthouse or at least a loft.’

  ‘I don’t like lifts that talk.’

  ‘Have you tried hypnosis?’

  ‘It’s not a fear, it’s a quirk. I’m against them. “Doors opening.”’ He mimicked a talking lift. ‘What’s that about?’

  ‘Fantasies of domination and servility I imagine.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s like sex tourism.’

  ‘But only in the vaguest, most abstract way.’

  ‘That’s good enough for me. Shall I brew up? Isn’t that what they say in Coketown, “brew up”?’

  They were in the kitchen, which was made entirely of stainless steel. Kidney was pointing to the space-age teapot.

  ‘That’s what they say. I’m not really tired, you know.’

  Kidney turned to look at her. It was a real look, the kind of look E had forgotten about, the kind of look that you could have hung your washing on. Stripped of his thick rubber jacket, Kidney had sinewy, rustic forearms and little bony knobs on his shoulders; you could see them under his T-shirt. Here in his own kitchen his body seemed dense and forthright. She had said it without thinking. She had stepped over something, she knew. A line or a cliff?

  He walked across the kitchen towards her. The comical trawlerman boots squeaked a little on the industrial steel flooring. E’s hair, frizzed and thinned out by pregnancy, was wrapped in a plum-coloured chiffon scarf which had once belonged to her Aunt Judy. She felt suddenly certain that the scarf had been a terrible mistake – that it made her look ill rather than interesting. Kidney, without apparently noticing the scarf at all, leaned across her belly and kissed her.

  Bristle, tongue, nose.

  So that’s what it feels like, she thought. That’s what it feels like to be kissed by someone who isn’t Morris.

  They moved slowly and imprecisely apart. Kidney’s eyes, she noticed, were rimmed with red. His breath smelled dusty and charred.

  ‘I’m actually speechless.’ He seemed genuinely surprised.

  ‘Well, let’s see,’ said E. ‘“I’ve wanted to do that for a long time” is an old favourite or, barring that, a simple “Cor” might do.’

  ‘Phwoar?’

  ‘Cor. There’s a subtle but important difference.’

  The kettle clicked off.

  ‘Saved by the boil,’ said E.

  Kidney warmed the pot, then looked for teabags. The only other man she had ever met who warmed the pot was Morris. He did it assiduously, four swirls then out. He also used loose leaf tea and a cosy. It had been the first thing she noticed about him – before they had started going out, when he was just a name, an odd but oddly sexy face on the edge of her grad-student circle. She had always loved the way he made tea, the casual carefulness of it, the assumption that that was simply the way it was done. So sure, so easy, as if Rotherham was it.

  Kidney took a tea cosy out of the drawer. It was black and made by the ICA.

  ‘Is that a tea cosy?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He came back at her. They kissed again. E thought of Morris at the kitchen sink, swirling, warming, measuring out the tea. Kidney’s tongue was granulated and gentle. She wished the idea of Morris would go away, for a while at least – for an evening. She tried to concentrate instead on the kissing. She pressed against his teeth. She thought of Morris measuring the milk, giving the pot a stir, pouring. Kidney sidled around her bump to change the angle of approach. He started doing something lovely with her hair. It was nice. She wanted more of it. Kidney felt like a path she could run down, a grassy, sloping path with gentle, lolling turns. She thought of them all: Morris, Molly and her sitting at the kitchen table on Sunday morning, drinking tea, eating Hobnobs, surrounded by mess and crumble. It was raining, the radio was on, Molly was cranky, Morris was silent. It was all crap except the tea. The tea was always right – hot not burning, strong but never stewed, sour, sharp, profound, perfect.

  Kidney stopped kissing and looked at her carefully. He angled his head. It was the kind of look she imagined he might give to a piece that was not quite coming together, that was evading him – sad, fierce and puzzled. With some embarrassment, E realised that she was panting.

  ‘Is it the baby then?’ he said after a while.

  ‘Actually it’s the husband.’

  ‘Is it really?’

  ‘I know,’ said E. ‘Who would have guessed?’

  Next morning, E’s train slid past the East Coketown redevelopment zone. They were removing the scaffolding from the Matter-horn leisure complex. Its steel cladding barked back the brightness of the unseasonable sun. It glared like a ziggurat on the plains of scrubby grass and hardcore. Passengers pointed and raised their eyebrows. On the left were the boarded up and valueless terraces of Rumpswick, a last stronghold of negative equity, a place where the remaining residents hunkered before their huge TVs and dreamed of EU funding.

  E was in a non-smoking window seat in carriage G. Opposite her was a man in a brown stocking cap with an Adam Ant-style band of acne across his nose and a liking for novelty ring tones. E was working on her birth plan: things to demand; things to refuse; things to take and leave; dos and don’ts; nevers and maybes. It was becoming long and complex – there were arrows, subdivisions, appendices – but she was enjoying it anyway. Life, she felt that morning, that sunny Coketown morning, was pointing forwards for once. Knowing she would not sleep with Kidney had given her a sudden, unexpected strength. If necessary, if she had to, she could carry them all – Morris, Molly, the baby. She would strap them to her aching back and lug them forwards. She would make them happy whether they liked it or not.

  Coketown was dusty and hot. Hotter than E could ever remember it being. Hotter even than when she had left the day before. Above the streets there was haze and wobble, while below in the culverts and storm drains there was only dryness and peace. These alien conditions had produced in the normally temperate Coketown population a tendency towards acts of unusual beneficence or spite. E was shepherded to the front of the taxi rank and whisked away by a foul-mouthed Moldovan in a permanent state of road-rage. The journey was so quick it was half the normal fare. On arrival, the driver kissed her hand, apologised for his foul language and refused a tip. The house seemed smaller, more precious than she had remembered, and for once there was no smell of mould. The garden was a palette of yellow and brown. Oh, what will become of the slugs, she wondered? Would they have a bolt hole, a secret place of dampness and slime wherein to regroup, to save themselves, until normal co
nditions returned? She hoped not. Her baby would be born in the year of the heatwave then, after a summer of extremes: the summer when the River Err coagulated; the summer when mineral water was more expensive than beer. That was how the child would have its beginning.

  Morris was at work, she remembered. It was the day of the trial, disciplinary hearing, whatever it was. Molly and Morris’s mum were undoubtedly at the park, which boasted a large and lavatorial lido. She opened windows and tidied. She felt suddenly, uncharacteristically minded to wash the floor.

  She found the mop and while she was looking for a bucket she noticed there was a message on the machine. The tape whirred back to its beginning. There was a beep and then an old, slurred, but shouty male voice.

  ‘This is for Mrs Gutman. Your husband, partner, whatever he is, is fucking Zoe Cable.’ There was a long gap. In the background there were boings and whirrs as if the man was standing next to a fruit machine. ‘Also, he’s a maleficent rogue with the probity of a bucket of shit.’

  There was another beep and then another less catastrophic message from her Uncle Tim.

  After a minute or two, E found the bucket. She filled it with warm water and soap and began to mop the kitchen floor. She did it thoroughly and carefully. She moved the kitchen chairs and table, she even pulled out the gas cooker and confronted the knobbly weave of grease and dirt which lay beneath.

  After she had washed it once she rinsed, and after she had rinsed, noticing certain patches of dried-in filth, certain cracks where decades of dirt had hardened and cauterised, she got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed. She was dismayed to find, however, that these areas would not come clean. The muck seemed to have become ingrained, a part of the very flooring that was designed to ward it off. She became irritated by this, then annoyed and then finally enraged. She began, in her frustration, to stab at the reluctant lino with a paring knife and then to pull it off in uneven chunks. She found that she enjoyed doing this, that it gave her more pleasure than cleaning ever had. When her mother-in-law and Molly returned home from the park an hour or so later they discovered E carrying out the kitchen floor in bin bags.

  Chapter 25

  The disciplinary hearing was to be held in Cormorant Hall, Committee Room L. Cormorant Hall, which was at the epicentre of the Coketown University Administrative Pentagon, was accessible only via annex A of the Cripponden Building, and thence through a cobbled, subterranean walkway and up along a shoeworn flight of pink marble stairs, the balustrade of which was inset with the porky visages of the seven founders of the original Coketown College.

  Morris rather wished he had brought a map. Either that or listened more carefully to the perky woman from Personnel who had offered him directions over the phone. The corridors of Cormorant Hall were long and inscrutable. The brass-knobbed doors which led off them were poorly signed and offered little or no hint of what they concealed. Seeking assistance, Morris opened one. It was a cupboard. Another revealed a language lab full of men in uniform chanting useful Russian phrases, a third opened into an office with a single metal desk. Behind the desk was a spruced-up woman in a houndstooth cardigan, who appeared to be expecting him.

  ‘I’m looking for Committee Room L,’ he said.

  ‘Of course Dr Gutman.’ She stood up.

  ‘Right out of here, through the double doors, up the staircase on the right.’ She was gesturing as she spoke in the drilled but ironic manner of an air stewardess going through the safety procedure. ‘Left, then left again, through the double doors. Follow the left fork. Double-back and Committee Room L is on your right. I’m sure they’re expecting you.’

  Morris thanked her. He turned right, went through the double doors and was climbing the stairs when he ran into Zoe Cable. She was wearing a shredded peasant blouse and oil-streaked Levis.

  ‘I’m not here,’ she said.

  ‘Officially, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, but unofficially it’s good to see you. Do you need to review?’

  ‘I doubt it. My role is to deny everything.’

  ‘That’s it. We’re going negative.’

  Morris slipped a finger inside one of the rips in her peasant blouse and fondled her midriff. Feelings of lust and need slid forwards and crashed against his ribcage like foot passengers on a cross-channel ferry.

  ‘You should go the back way,’ Zoe advised. ‘You don’t want to run into Bernard or the Crocodile at this stage. It might throw you off your game.’

  Morris nuzzled her neck. Zoe leaned her head back and ummed and ahhed a little.

  ‘There’s a back way?’ he said.

  ‘Of course. Down the stairs, turn right, through the double doors. Through the swing door marked “strictly no admittance” over the metal gantry, up the fire escape and in through the first window – there’s a stained-glass architrave of the founders distributing knowledge to the benighted African. You can’t miss it. Committee Room L is two doors down on the left. You should hurry.’

  They kissed. After Morris had recovered from his disorientation, he descended the stairs. He turned right and went through the double doors. He was just about to push open the door marked ‘strictly no admittance’ when it swung open from the other side and the Crocodile burst through.

  ‘Morris!’ he said, beaming. ‘You know the back way.’

  Morris gulped. The Crocodile squeezed his upper arm and nodded.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know it’s a big day. Bigger than we thought – Bernard’s nominated Mordred Evans as his advocate.’ The Crocodile’s grip tightened, his nostrils flared.

  ‘Is that good?’ asked Morris vaguely.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said the Crocodile, dropping into a tone of cool certainty. ‘It’s good. Let me put it this way, Morris: we can work, we can plan, we can scheme even (although I dislike that word intensely), but our greatest joys come always from above. I’m not a religious man Morris, as you know, but today is a gift in my opinion. Mordred. Who would have imagined?’ He bit his lip and nodded again. His nose was rather close to Morris’s. ‘This is how it ends.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ said Morris.

  ‘Your best?’

  The Crocodile looked at him. There was long and uncomfortable eye contact. The Crocodile’s gaze had the intensity of a CAT scan. As it continued without pause or explanation Morris felt irrationally certain that he could see what Morris was up to. That through those black, magnetic eyes, Morris’s treachery would stand out clear and red as a haematoma. Morris stopped breathing, then braced himself.

  ‘You should understand, there will come a point in there today,’ said the Crocodile eventually, ‘when things become quite unpleasant. If when that point arrives, Morris, you begin to feel qualms, if you are touched by the chill hand of doubt, do me a favour – look around the room and ask yourself one simple question: who is the biggest bastard here?’

  There was another weighty pause. Morris felt like a weld about to crack. From behind the swing door came the hum of large machinery.

  ‘That’s right,’ the Crocodile winked. ‘It’s me.’

  Morris’s legs wobbled as he crossed the iron gantry. His stomach was being gently stroked by nausea. The thought of crumbling appealed to him strongly, but there was, he realised, no place left to crumble. The only way out was forward – through the Crocodile, through the Digital Faculty Proposal, through Mordred even, to Zoe and the Hub. It was, he sadly realised, now much too late for fear. The LA Body Conference, the Dalton Street car park, the job interview – those had been the places for fear, not Committee Room L. Committee Room L, wherever the hell it was, (the iron gantry seemed unusually long and bendy), was the place for tight-bollocked, groin-led courage. The place to fuck or be fucked.

  He found the fire escape, ascended a flight of rusted, clangy steps and climbed back in to Cormorant Hall through an already open sash window. A man from Personnel was waiting for him.

  ‘Dr Gutman,’ he smiled and offered his hand. ‘I think they’re ready to begin.’


  Committee Room L was fluorescently lit, wood-panelled and unpleasantly hot. It smelt of radiators and old floor polish. In the centre of the room was a large, U-shaped table. At the far side, raised on a shallow, carpeted stage, was a long desk with six throne-like chairs. Looming over the desk was an allegorical painting of the founders offering the oil lamp of wisdom to the cringing and grimy apprentices of Olde Coketown whilst skewering the windy serpent of trade unionism with their free hands.

  Seated at the desk were Brendan Bombay, the well-groomed Head of Personnel, his assistant and ex-lover, Roy Dervish, and the three tribunal members. Slightly to one side, half-hidden in the shadows of a fire hose, there was a small, dingy and unassuming man whom Morris immediately recognised as Dennis Sloze.

  At the far side of the U-shaped table, sitting together, were Mordred Evans, Bernard and a hairy and unconvincing union rep named Yacob Macomb. Mordred’s glasses were pale brown, his suit was several shades of green. He sat silently, looking straight ahead with the fierce stiffness of the newly dead. Bernard had a black eye, the rest of his face was drained and chalky. He seemed to have dressed in instalments, there being no identifiable relationship between tie, shirt and jacket. Morris could smell beer from twenty-five feet. Bernard’s condition (re sobriety or drunkenness) was clearly an issue for Yacob Macomb, who was whispering energetically in his ear and plying him with instant coffee.

  Directly opposite the group, on the other side of the table, was an empty orthopaedic chair (obviously the Crocodile’s) and, next to it, Doris Pamplona, the Faculty Secretary and designated minute-taker.

  Morris was shown to his seat on a side bench. Brendan Bombay smiled emptily at him. Bernard sneered and made a wanking gesture before being seized by Yacob Macomb.

  ‘We’re just waiting for the Dean,’ explained Brendan Bombay. Morris nodded. The Crocodile was obviously taking his time, ratcheting up the tension. Hardly necessary, thought Morris, since Bernard was already a lump and Mordred Evans looked about as easy to faze as a breeze-block. After about five more minutes, the Crocodile came in and sat down without explanation or apology.