‘Eat some,’ I said, and put a glaring-pink spoonful of ice cream in her mouth. ‘Here,’ I said, and held my wine glass to her mouth. ‘Mix red and pink.’
‘What if I were up the duff?’
‘Are you?’ I said.
‘How would I know, you berk? It’s not my period for a couple of weeks. We haven’t been very careful lately, though. Don’t you keep track of it at all?’
‘Oh yes, I forgot,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
‘You great loon. Walloon. You don’t even know how often I have it, really, do you?’
‘Menses.’
‘Very clever.’
‘When are you going to marry me?’ I said.
‘Now?’
‘Good.’ I pulled a stick-shaped packet of sugar from the bowl, emptied the contents, and attempted to tie the paper into a ring. It sprang back stiffly. I spat upon it, moulding it into shape, and pressed it on to her finger. It hesitated, then flopped on to the table in a pulpy mess. She laughed.
‘I’ll make you another one,’ I said, emptying more sugar into the ashtray, spilling some on to the table. ‘When shall we – you know–?’
‘Are you asking me to marry you?’
‘You know I am. Don’t we ask each other all the time? Let’s just do it next year. This coming year, I mean. What if you were pregnant? Would you then?’
‘Not for that reason. I just want to be able to do it properly. But when are we ever going to be able to afford it, to have a big party?’
‘Fuck knows,’ I said. A stab of shame caught my throat: a glimpse of truth. ‘Surely we’ll make a wodge this coming year.’
‘Will we? Somehow?’ said Lelia, more tied to simple fact than I was.
‘It’s really irritating, isn’t it?’ I said moodily. ‘They’re all getting these huge thundering bloody houses suddenly. These are my friends. I want everyone to still eat pasta and live in studio flats. Much more comforting. It’s got to the stage where you can’t bring a bottle of Hardy’s without it being hidden away. It’s really pissing me off.’
‘Shut up, Richard,’ said Lelia. ‘Shut up about it or move out of Bloomsbury to somewhere sensible. Or get rich.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and sighed. ‘You’re right. Anyway, I’ve got you. I’d live in a Wimpey bungalow with you.’
‘I thought it was a garden shed!’ said Lelia indignantly.
‘That too. A kennel. A drain.’
‘A sewer, you said. Would you actually live in a sewer?’
‘To be with you, yes. A mews house in Hampstead on my own, or a dark dripping stinking sewer with you? Easy bloody peasy, sweetheart.’
‘Good. But would you live with me in New Zealand?’
‘Of course. As long as you behaved. Wales. Uzbekistan. Guam.’
‘Good.’
I smiled at her.
She licked a last melting lump of ice cream with the tip of her tongue. ‘That’s as it should be.’
‘I’ll pay.’
‘Right. I’ll bring the car just outside. I’ll hoot.’
‘Be careful on that side street.’
On the way to the till, I glanced at the table where the mousy woman sat, and saw her writing, surrounded by precise, ordered things like a girl’s: a small leather-covered address book, lined paper, a notebook. The light caught her clean-looking hair. I’d forgotten about her. I hadn’t even remembered to tell Lelia that she was there.
‘Bye,’ I called. I struggled to remember her name. ‘Nice to see you again.’
She turned.
‘Yes,’ she said. She looked at me. ‘It was lovely to run into you,’ she said. ‘A surprise. I’d only just seen you.’ She hesitated.
I paused. She looked up at me again. She appeared very solitary in her nest of books, like a neat but sequestered pigeon.
‘Look, give us a call,’ I said munificently, feeling for a card, and not really meaning to say what I had just said. ‘We’ll ask you over next time we have Ren for supper or something.’
She turned to me again. The car horn hooted.
‘I can’t find one. Sorry. Just come over with Ren sometime.’
‘Oh, you live near me,’ I said, surprised, glancing at the small figures on the paper.
‘Do I?’
‘WC1?’
She nodded.
‘See you,’ I said.
Lelia pulled away, the car’s faulty heating jerkily emitting warmth and then streaming cold.
‘There was that girl in there,’ I said. ‘She was at MacDara’s last night.’
‘Was there?’
‘That mousy-ish one.You know the one I mean? I couldn’t really remember her.’
‘I think so – the one next to Ren, you mean? There was someone kind of quiet but quite nice-seeming, but I didn’t talk to her.’
‘She told me her name. Look at that wanker doing a U-ey. Slightly French, I think.’
‘I don’t know. I wanted to say something to her, but I didn’t. I felt like I should introduce her to people or something.’
‘Yes, well she was in there.’
‘I didn’t see her at all.’
‘I kind of vaguely said she could come round sometime with Ren.’
‘Oh God, we don’t want to go that far, do we? She seemed – a bit – um … dull? But I’m a bitch. You’re much nicer. Sometimes.’
‘Christmas largesse.’
‘Yes, it’s funny, isn’t it? I go all sloppy at Christmas. It makes me want to cry, the idea of old people on their own. Is it just guilt?’
‘I don’t know. I think charities collect more at Christmas. You can give the Big Issue seller those manky clementines from Safeway’s if you want.’
‘You bastard,’ said Lelia, and laughed.
‘What I never know,’ I said, ‘is whether or not you’re supposed to say “Happy Christmas” when you pass a stranger on the street on actual Christmas Day. Do you, you know, just ignore each other as normal, or do you call out a cheery Dickensian greeting like you do to shopkeepers and telephone operators, or do they think you’re a nutter if you even catch their eye?’
‘Oh, Richard,’ she said, smiling. ‘Only you–’
‘I know, I know,’ I said. I leaned over and moved further and further up her thigh till she laughed and screamed at me to stop.
As we approached the flat, I remembered the email I had been sent. Through the windows of the houses strung with lights, their trees burning white, another dirty little message would wing its way here to sully my computer. That beardy wino, sitting in some sordid cafe in South London, dumping his strangeness on a stranger, or a madwoman in a bedsit distorting her youth. I knew it would be there; I was curious, but I decided to leave it untouched until after Christmas, as though preserving my life exactly as it was.
Three
Richard
We lived in Bloomsbury, among the green shadows to the right of the city’s heart, where no one but students and strange old ladies of forgotten Mitteleuropean origins lived: the transient and the dying beneath a crust of American tourism.
I insisted on staying in Bloomsbury out of some misplaced metropolitan imperative that was, beneath it all, a parochial terror of mud and small-town people. Then the country boy in me made a village of London WC1, so my daily life was strung between the limits of seven dog-marked squares, and newsagents beneath blue plaques, and strip-lit rip-off shops. For my office job, editing the book pages of a newspaper four days a week, while I attempted the increasingly nightmarish task of completing a biography on the fifth, I had to venture into adjacent Clerkenwell, a ten-minute walk, which seemed a different land; while Lelia, who worked at the university, could take a tiny stroll from our flat towards Russell Square. I lived in that central area for odd, stubborn reasons – Bloomsbury was not Bodmin Moor; the sheep could not come back to get me there – among those who were younger than me or older than me. I never expected Sylvie to live there too.
Our cramped, lovely flat was in Mecklenburgh Squa
re, up three flights of stairs, overlooking the private garden on one side, with its improbable airy tumblings of green, and an Art Deco monstrosity on the other, with washing lines and crumbling metal balconies above the muted roar of traffic. The place changed when Lelia moved there. It was transformed from my untidy small flat with newspapers on the stairs to a crookedy home, up and down, like the tiniest house.
‘A cottage!’ she had exclaimed, and I began to think of it, after that, as one of those miniature sloping cottages by the sea. One bedroom and a boxroom beneath a low ship’s ceiling of mahogany-coloured wood; skylight on to a minute section of roof, with Lelia’s plant pots up there in the high gritty air; my tiny study and one big room downstairs in which we lived, its tall windows looking on to the world, its curtains brushing the old floorboards, the table always high with toppling piles of post and work, with candlesticks, plants shedding leaves, and glittery things bought by Lelia.
Such choices were more universal than I’d thought. Even the candlesticks, dusted with pollen, were probably categorisable, as was our very existence; but I, blundering male that I was, had failed to realise it. I was once aggrieved, when flat-searching, to find that everyone was the same. In Farringdon, in Camden, in Kentish Town and Chalk Farm, identical novels sat on shelves; the same CDs, evidence of exhibitions visited, plays seen, Taschen postcards propped against spines. The cross-referencing proliferated: familiar bowls from early-nineties Habitat, the same tiles behind sinks, poetry fridge magnets, those chipped orange cast-iron pans, and, inevitably, among the other horrible reminders of one’s own limitations – always, always, on floor, sofa or table, The Guide from the Guardian. I felt irritated and claustrophobic, as though I had inadvertently been corralled into a club or a competition in which everyone imbibed identical cultural information for a surprise exam. We too could be categorised, then, along with everyone I had ever laughed at. But of course we could, said Lelia calmly in the face of my disgust. We had less money than those tossers, I pointed out. I grew up hundreds of miles away with fucking sheep; she was half-Indian, for God’s sake.
‘So?’ said Lelia.
So. Perhaps our lives were ripe for disruption. My career was going well, even if it was badly paid, at that point, although it still filled me with a sense of inadequacy. I had, miraculously, found my love. Her discovery seemed to me like freakish fortune. I feared cancer, wheelchairs and MS as punishment for my luck, but perhaps my fears were merely an insurance policy, and beneath it all we were more complacent than we knew.
I drifted to my computer, my back clutching at the cold, the following morning. Christmas morning. She was still asleep, clasping the duvet. I eased myself out, protecting her sweet sleep. My hair stood on end. I had a piss. I looked at the street as I shaved. Windows lay dead across Gray’s Inn Road. I turned on the computer, fearing she would hear the opening cluster of notes and think me a madman. The crackling as I went online sounded like a fire of static echoing through the flat. There it was. There was nothing else. I was mildly affronted. I had expected a couple of greetings from friends abroad who couldn’t be bothered to send a card. I double-clicked on the indecipherable Hotmail address. The message had no title. It had been sent, I noticed, only minutes after I had arrived home the night before.
*
It occurred to me one morning that I had been born for suffering, just as other children were produced like small purses to sweep chimneys, or help with harvest, or pick pockets. I dreamt of orphanages, tantalising myself with a fortress in my head: a prison for little women who had committed the crime of being unlovable, because an unlovable child was against nature. I knew what I was. I was a runt, saved from an institution because I performed a purpose. My task was to receive my mother’s displeasure.
The weirdo was clearly sending me fragments of fiction. Someone who knew what I did for a living was trying to tempt me with sections of their short story or novel, so that I could discover their nascent genius. They probably also posted instalments on their website for three unemployed wasters to read between pub visits. What was I supposed to do? Reply, You write like an angel? Ring my best friend the publisher as a matter of urgency? Or simply have my curiosity piqued in private? I was perplexed. Grateful to be free of the curse of literary aspiration myself, and surrounded by novels jostlng for attention, I was highly intolerant of friends-of-friends’ outpourings, saddened and guilty in the face of their immense effort. Reading the email, I felt once again as though I had touched a stranger, their particles of skin upon my fingers.
I went upstairs. I felt the warmth pockets, smelling of Lelia, that her body had made between the duvet and the sheet.
‘Tea,’ she moaned, sleep-rumpled.
I brought it to her, and she shifted herself against the wooden back of the bed.
‘Good Lord, a stocking!’ I said.
I pulled out miniature tiles from the British Museum shop.
‘Thank you,’ I said, kissing her lips. Her eyes widened against sleep.
I found pens, a Professor Calculus keyring, a 1960s children’s sailing guide.
I was immensely moved by the care behind her choices. I put my arm round her and drew her to me. I pulled out a net of chocolate coins, and we started to eat their delicious, tasteless, powdery substance. She removed the tangerine from the sock’s toe, and opened it.
‘The Christmas smell,’ she said. ‘Tangerines and chocolate.’ I felt the startlingly hot hollow at the top of her thigh.
Memory came spooling back. Her nightie, sweet, cottony, was suddenly scented with my mother. I wanted a child to be with us at Christmas.
We stumbled through the tree-lit flat barely dressed. We argued idly, for the sake of it, and sat on the floor watching Christmas films beneath an outspread dressing-gown. Lelia sat rapt and happy through girlhood chick flicks – Little Women, National Velvet, The Railway Children – sobbing amidst embarrassed laughter at returning fathers and precocious triumphs, before we entered the darkening day in search of late Chinese lunch, or coffee in cheap, steaming cafes. I knew then that I loved it, that seamless round of laziness scented with pine needles; yet a habitual tumour of anxiety located in my stomach spread its tendrils through me to prevent pure happiness, and I was aware that I wasn’t enjoying it quite as much as I’d think I had later, when nostalgia imbued memory with less complicated loveliness. The acceptance of good fortune is an almost impossible feat for a standard neurotic like me.
At the end of December, we went to a private view of Ren’s paintings.
Dear, clever Ren, the reserved workaholic whose expertise in computer technology gradually metamorphosed into this. His intricate paintings on glass: blips, beads, interconnected by a hair-thin network, resembled an open radio panel, the connections glowing as though electrified.
It was a shouting gathering, the guests carefree with Christmas inactivity. I saw the mouse girl standing there with someone, and I instinctively looked elsewhere to avoid having to talk to her before I found more interesting company.
Ren was mingling with the suits who now bought his work, his expression considerate and Ren-like as he talked. I looked at him and contemplated the dedication that lay as an invisible stratum beneath his success, and felt a spasm of guilt at my comparative laziness, an indolence that I could ill afford yet spasmodically, self-loathingly indulged.
Ren had studied Indian miniature painting with an expert he had tracked down in Southall. For some years, he immersed himself by day in computer technology, then drew the same line, fine as a scratch, over and over in the evening, disciplining his hand. The same whisper of a line. Nothing else. After half a decade of silent work, the computer connections in his mind flowered on glass. The large panels, fruits of many months of intense labour by steady-handed Ren, began to grace corporate lobbies. The idea of Ren – my old, unexpected friend, with three children to support – the idea of Ren as artist was so incongruous, it was exhilarating. Anyone could do anything. I’d always known it, but I realised it aga
in with a lurch. I’d lost the urgency of my faith along the way.
‘Come on,’ I said to Lelia. ‘Let’s get a drink.’
‘Well, should I be knocking it back?’ she said. ‘I could always be pregnant.’
‘God,’ I said. I kept forgetting. The idea was thrilling, and alien; it seemed impossible. ‘Let’s get you some dull fruit punch or something, then. I don’t have to, like, “support” you, Lelia, and not drink or anything, do I?’ I asked in Stoke Newington tones.
‘Thanks so much,’ said Lelia dryly. ‘Look, there’s Kathy! She looks bloody awful. I want to go and say hello.’
‘Hypocrite,’ I said. Hypocrite lecteur, I thought. What did that mean? I never knew. I could ask Lelia. Hypocritical reader? What was that? I felt indignant at my lack of comprehension, as I did with various titles – The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Red Hot and Blue; Bo’ Selecta – whose meaning eluded, and therefore irritated, me. I looked for Ren, wondering whether I should go over and congratulate him a bit, but he was still talking to some suits, who meant business, and boredom. I had a sneaking suspicion that they patronised him when they spoke to him because he wasn’t English.
‘Hello,’ said the mouse, speaking into a gap between people.
‘Oh hello,’ I replied. I scanned my memory. With a huge effort, attempting to dredge a weight out of murky substances, I failed to remember her name again. As I stopped trying, I got it. ‘Sylvie,’ I said. ‘What does hypocrite lecteur mean, apart from – as it sounds?’
‘– Mon semblable – mon frere,’ she said. ‘Baudelaire.’
‘Right.’ Beneath her quietness, I could hear an authentic French accent.
‘It’s from “Au Lecteur”. Les Fleurs du Mal. He’s teasingly accusing the reader of being an accomplice of the author a sort of knowing hypocrite.’
‘Good gracious, I should know that, shouldn’t I? Thank you, miss.’
‘It’s one of the emblems of modernism.’
‘Well, thanks for explaining to the ignoramus. Are you French?’
‘No. A bit,’ she said. ‘My father was three-quarters.’
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