‘I’ve turned into a fucking teenager,’ he said, slapping his briefcase on the table.
‘Wet dreams and foul moods?’ I said. ‘Att-wactive, MacD.’
‘Worse,’ he muttered, rearranging himself in a sliding pile of newspaper, snowy gloves and mobile.
‘Are you a surly egomaniac with only your dick for a friend?’
He sniggered. ‘Basically, yes.’
‘A monomaniac. How is she?’
‘How should I know? Ask her manly consort.’
‘Haven’t you seen her?’
‘Nope.’
‘Why not?’
‘How should I know? I’m not allowed to, I suppose – I might get above myself. She must keep me on my toes at all times. Anyway, good little wifey has to stay at home and suck off hubby.’
‘What does he do?’
He shrugged. ‘Shovel shit?’
‘So has she come back?’ I said, gingerly picking up an oil-smeared plastic-covered menu. ‘Been in touch, I mean?’
‘Why do you like greasy spoons so much?’ said MacDara grumpily, scanning the Specials board with its clumsy gothic writing. He was stubbled, as ever, his hair disordered with snow that had melted and dried it into short spikes.
I laughed. ‘You look like Dennis the Menace,’ I said.
‘Thanks.’
‘So what’s happened?’
‘Yeah, well, she’s condescended to phone me. The bitch. I’m meeting her tomorrow. Fuck. It makes my insides go just to think about it.’
‘Have you shagged her yet?’
He shook his head miserably, like the bear that he resembled. ‘Everything but. We were going to. She slipped away. Don’t know what’s happened. My knob’s just about…’
An image came unbidden. A spasm of arousal shot through me as I remembered the lapping heat in my thigh, the insistent pain at the back of my neck as it mounted to pleasure. I wanted to tell him. I wanted to shock him, surprise him, impress him. I took a vast gulp of rough red wine, then another. Its warmth travelled up my spinal cord to my head, and tempting plans began to bloom. Wouldn’t marriage, enhanced by the most subtle, clandestine affair – all silent, urgent meetings in flats, tucked into slips in time – coat each day with a delectable sensation of aliveness? It would be like a passionate hobby, each day adding a jewel to the collection.
‘Tell me,’ I said, grinning, playing for time to prevent myself from rashly blurting out a confession when Catrin was holding fire.
‘… coming off,’ he said. ‘Worn away.’
I see.
‘I’ve never been like this,’ MacDara roared, thumping the table so that the salt cellar jumped. I laughed. ‘I’m doing everything I stopped doing at nineteen. Our communications era is a fucking nightmare, Richard. If I’m not 1471-ing, I’m checking the frigging call-waiting, fax, mobile – voicemail and texts – emails.’
‘I told you to cut down contact,’ I said in as strict a voice as I could be bothered to muster. ‘Does she email a lot?’
‘Emails – yes. Proper, normal human contact – no.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Tell me more.’
‘I can’t – I can’t sleep. When have you known me not to sleep?’
‘Never,’ I said. ‘You’re a snoring warthog with narcolepsy.’
‘Exactly.’
The crowds began to fill the booths, smoke rising as we ate superior pasta and tasteless buttery fish. I ordered more wine.
‘Catrin,’ I said tentatively, my heartbeat accelerating. ‘Has she said anything? I mean–’ I said, hearing myself.
‘No,’ said MacDara blankly.
‘Right…’ I said.
I laughed. I goaded him into further confession, guessing at the most sordid of his new habits, teasing him viciously as I invented new perversions for him and drank more wine.
Snow lined the sills outside. People arrived, breathing loudly and stamping their feet. Stern, overworked waitresses wove through crowded tables of shouting people, and the air was festive. I was in a kamikaze good mood. I had a few days’ grace, though my crimes had now proliferated and I was intoxicated with lust. But beyond simple lust, I was buoyed up by the astonishment of desire reciprocated by a strange Victorian virgin. A stream of exhilaration, laced with alcohol, ran like poison through my blood. I felt the soreness at the back of my neck.
‘How many emails tomorrow, then, slave driver?’
‘Two,’ I replied, distracted. ‘When are you meeting her?’
‘Afternoon,’ said MacDara. He opened his diary. ‘Three o’clock.’ He laughed. ‘She wrote in it.’
I pulled his diary towards me. If we do meet again, why we shall smile, I read. The handwriting was small, unremarkable.
‘A quote!’ I said. ‘For a philistine like you. Does this woman read?’ I asked, my mind drifting to Sylvie and her bookish ways and her mouth and that mouth on my neck. ‘How do you cope, MacD?’ I teased him.
‘Shut up,’ said MacDara. He paused and looked disconcerted. ‘Give it back.’
‘You’d better read a book.’
‘Shut it, Fearon,’ said MacDara, pouring me more wine. ‘Tell me something else,’ he said, pulling the diary back and closing it. ‘What’s new in the world of hacking?’
The wine descended through my head in languorous spirals. I checked my watch. I would have to go home soon, or Lelia would be worried and angry and we’d have a ghastly row about it, but I couldn’t. I did not want to go home. The guiltier I felt, the more tetchy I was with her, and then the guilt itself worsened. I drank more. My mouth was loose with alcohol. I felt haggard. I sat there, and what was happening finally hit me. I had found the life, the woman, the love I had wanted after so many disasters, and then I had begun to destroy it. It was as though the police were tailing me, calmly following my car, and even though I drove a steady course, I knew that my alcohol levels were over the limit, and that when they stopped me, I would be arrested. There was nowhere to hide. And what I didn’t know was whether we would drive and drive down interminable side streets, warding off inevitability, or whether they would pull me over at any moment.
Eleven
Lelia
As the nausea rose, I pressed my fingers together, watching the colour change beneath my nails. It sometimes amazed me that I had blood, like other people, flowing invisibly, and now revealing its flush of red to me. Inadequate, or strange, or unwittingly harmful as I might be, my body behaved like other humans’, something that touched me and surprised me when I felt despairing about myself.
I hung my head over the loo, and sickness rolled inside me, my mouth filling with saliva. I heard the phone ring as I pulled the flush; it was too late to pick it up. There was another message from Catrin to call her, but I couldn’t have a conversation when all I wanted was to vomit. I could do nothing. Was this what happened? Did sickness drive women into their own sealed-off world of obsession and memory, a place of nightmares and scrappy images from the past?
My body was changing. A dark line scored my stomach like rind. Veins glowed blue on my breasts.
I couldn’t concentrate. For the first time in my life, hard work was a torment. I badly needed to complete an article for my RAE submission, but I had hardly begun, and my head of department was bothering me for it. I lowered my head over the sink and a couple of dry heaves followed. I was due to give a tutorial in half an hour to a somewhat sharp-tongued post-grad who was writing about the nouveaux romanciers involvement with cinema. There was a Butor reference I needed to find, and some passages from Robbe-Grillet that needed checking over.
Lucy from along the street looked up. Stubble burn was pink around her mouth.
‘Shit weather,’ she said.
I looked across the gardens. The sky was muffled and expectant, as though it held more snow.
‘I love it,’ I said. ‘How are you?’
She shrugged. She turned on her heel and faced the street.
‘I see loads of stuff happening round here,�
�� she said.
‘I’m sure you do, Lucy,’ I said somewhat wearily, and breathed in more air to calm my nausea. Richard’s descriptions of Lucy as a teenage evil force returned to me. My throat contracted. ‘Bye,’ I said rapidly, and fetched myself a bowl.
I was so very tired, my head seemed weighted, as though it nodded from side to side. I fell asleep. When I woke, it was lunchtime and my student would have given up long ago. My shock at myself was buoyed by a kind of internal smile at my own new carelessness. Whenever the sickness wore off in the afternoon, my senses sprang to life. I drifted up to our bed.
Bespectacled virgin that I was, the first time I really thought about sex was in France. My penfriend Sophie-Hélène, with her thick black plait, her affronting tufts of underarm hair and blood-stained underwear, was more mature than I was. When I couldn’t stand the pain of mourning any more, I talked about sex with this girl who knew, because sex seemed to be grief’s opposite, the most fantastically exciting idea. We sat on the flimsy concrete bridge that curved over the garden’s stream, where she whispered oblique hints of what it was she did, yet even with the limitations of my French, I understood.
But when Easter came with its prayer books and stilled mopeds, and Sophie-Hélène all but deserted me, I realised I had been just a substitute until her friend’s arrival. He was called Mazarine, like the cardinal. A small, guarded and epicene boy with dull-brown hair and a vocabulary that defeated me, he warned me off even as he addressed me with the most formal good manners.
There was nothing for me to do. Sophie-Hélène’s mother opened her door on to the street every day for the sweeping-out of invisible dust before a play-group invaded her house, when my own room was required for toddler naps. I couldn’t bear to be in the way; I couldn’t stand to be tolerated, so I followed Mazarine and Sophie-Hélène instead and hid myself there, on my own, killing the hours.
He was the doctor’s son. The doctor ran her surgery in her own house, following small-town French custom, the patients filing in through a side door to a waiting-room converted from a conservatory. The emerging smells filled me with guilt-battered horror: medicinal wafts, edges of disinfectant; the scent of a heart attack, the ambulance coming to take my father away on a stretcher. The doctor, Madame Belliere, though heavily pregnant, worked well into the evening, frowning through her fifties spectacles and choppy, thick boy’s fringe. She was an unsmiling dromedary of a woman, shirted and androgynous behind her pebble glasses. She left her son to his own devices; in fact, as I soon came to realise, she neglected him. It was painful to watch.
Mazarine’s father, clearly absent, was never mentioned; his mother was pregnant by another man, and the child was able to spend the day – nine or ten hours at a time, each one noted as a ritual by me – whispering in a yard behind the kitchen door, or ensconced with Sophie-Hélène in their private room at the top of the house, unheard and unobserved by the mother. If I wandered down and happened to pass Madame Belliere in the hallway between patients, she would address comments to me in her formal manner, enquiring after my happiness, stiffly praising me for my French or my appearance as though she felt sorry for me, and in her pity for the fatherless dark girl, there was a glimmer of empathy that rarely emerged in her dealings with her own child.
Rival though Mazarine was, his efforts to please his mother nearly broke my heart. He tried so hard to be good.Whatever happened to him, he tried. He hushed his companion if the solemn-faced doctor came into the house, his face a pale triangle of anxiety; he prepared little gifts and surprises for her in a way that I’d never seen a boy do. He had no real concept of play.
I explored alone when they were in their room, climbing high through that shuttered miniature chateau of a house heavy with antiques – fading wool curtains strung across antique spears; chamber pots hidden in scrolly armoires past books belonging to the boy that intimidated me, until one day, on a floor above the modern showers, I found a bath. An old bathroom, barely used, with dusty floorboards and closed shutters. I lay there for most of the day, and listened to silence and muffled conversation and sex, and praised a god that was my father.
He was there in patterns on the ceiling (I searched in a guilty panic as I lay down in the belching yellow water each morning until I found the particular stain that was him); his substance ran to me with the water; I heard him speak to me, and then the room was empty. There was his own island of chipped enamel in the archipelago that freckled the head of the bath, and the more I hit that particular spot with my forehead, the more I appeased the wrathful god attached to my father who blamed me for the ignorance and wilfulness that had allowed his death. However much I prayed, I knew that I had killed him. I had written of a father’s death in an English essay only a week and a half before – tears pricking at the death-bed scene; glory in the martyrdom of the narrator’s orphanhood – and then he had died. Through my dangerous powers I had managed to let him die. A thankless child.
I pressed my fingertips into splinters that fringed the floor as I tested myself mechanically on French vocabulary. From a room on the other side of the house, on that same attic level, came the muted moans and writhings of two children. We were fourteen. The boy, I thought, must be younger; he was slight, his voice unbroken, his skin pale-smooth. He had begun to fascinate me. I was deeply shocked that they were giving each other such pleasure. I could barely imagine him, earnest and undersized, entangled with Sophie-Hélène. And yet, somehow, I could.
Then the tenor of the house changed. The doctor was soon to have her child, a source of some scandal in the town. The day her son overheard his mother talking about giving birth by caesarean section at the end of the week, I listened to him vomit.
I lay in bed in our flat on Mecklenburgh Square and missed Richard. I wanted to feel his weight and disappear into forgetful darkness beneath his body. But Richard with his passionate, intense, exhausting ways had drifted from me and my baby. Part of me, sealed in my own world, was secure; but beneath the self-protection I was terrified, and wanted to beg him not to abandon me as I had always secretly feared he would do when he finally saw through me and found me lacking. And if he explored further, he would find worse in me, because there was something that I suspected about myself that I couldn’t make myself tell him. There was a worm at the core of me.
That winter, he wanted to be with MacDara, or drinking, or pretending to himself that he was about to swap his urban existence for a life of rugged adventure. He did not want to be with someone who was pregnant.
‘Let’s go and live on a boat,’ he always said.
‘But it would be awful,’ I’d reply, having visited friends in damp and rocking nightmares full of cold bunks on the Thames.
‘I really think we should live on a boat,’ he had announced more recently.
‘Yes, we will sometime,’ I had learnt to say for convenience, and my simple assent kept him satisfied.
As it grew darker, I went to bed once more. He hadn’t returned. ‘Richard,’ I murmured, and willed him to come home to me.
I lay back and opened my legs, and I thought once more of the little incubus, and I rose to the easy numb orgasms of masturbation. It was ten o’clock. I had a baby I was growing on my own. I had a love who was slowly abandoning me.
Twelve
Richard
I had, perhaps, a few days left. Even without the intervention of the awful Catrin, I would have been toppled by my own guilt or by some nasty fate-ridden surprise. Yet I had only snogged a woman. Sense spoke to me, mixing caution and relief, and reminding me that I could salvage what I still had, scarred though it would be by the terrible weight of Lelia’s angry disappointment. But every time I recalled a hot little ghost in the snow – like a film, like a film watched long ago – I wanted to see her again. She didn’t call. Catrin, it would seem, hadn’t rung again.
Lelia was my Lelia; we were both busy, I barely caught her eye in the rush between appointments and winter darkness and late bedtimes, and two days of eternity
managed to pass. I escaped early in the morning along frozen pavements to the office, where there were no emails from Sylvie to break the silence, the air outside too cold for snow to fall again. I looked out at the street and contemplated confessing to Lelia; or simply waiting, as blindly and merrily as a half-wit, for my doom. At the back of my neck, as yet undiscovered by her, a patch of skin was tender if I pressed it.
Another day passed. I am dying, Egypt, dying, I thought hammily dementedly my own internal voice a nervy tickertape of non sequiturs.
‘I’m passing by’, said Sylvie Lavigne, her voice a shock on my office phone. ‘We could meet very briefly if you want to.’
‘Yes,’ I said, stupid and husky. Where? I thought. When?
‘There’s that cafe beside your building. I’ll pass it in about ten minutes.’
‘Ten minutes?’ I said dumbly, the nerves in my scalp leaping.
She was silent. I felt myself grow hot in the space between words.
‘I’ll see you there,’ I said.
The cafe was a homey choke after the crystalline air outside. She smiled at me from the gloom of a corner at the back, where she sat upright behind a table in a beret and a coat. The beret lent a curve of life to her hair. She looked prim again, like an immaculately polished convent girl, all soaped and clean but unadorned. In today’s prudish guise, she would inevitably appear in my night-time fantasy.
I moved towards her through a cloud of espresso steam, as if to kiss her, but her posture remained unchanged, and I merely touched her cheek with the side of my mouth and sat down, rebuffed. I caught fragments of her skin smell through the smoke and bacon fat; dislodged snow melted in glittering ovals on her beret; her mouth was a pale series of swoops.
‘Hello,’ I said. I smiled.
She turned to me and smiled back, her eyes creasing and catching mine.
‘Oh, it’s lovely to see you,’ I said spontaneously.
‘You too,’ she said. ‘Very.’
‘Where’re you going?’ I said.
Sleep with Me Page 12
