The Paper Lovers

by Gerard Woodward

  Arnold knew of a place, five minutes down the High Street, left near the cathedral, that had been open only a few weeks, a place that served coffee with an earnestness that he thought the boy might appreciate. It sold specially imported coffee directly from growers. The tables were rough wooden desks. The boy’s appearance drew looks of surprise from the other customers, and some laughter. A table of young women kept turning and sniggering. The waitress recommended Rwandan red bourbon, which arrived at their table in pretty blue cups. The boy looked awkward, embarrassed. Sitting opposite each other, Arnold could examine him closely. He was extraordinarily beautiful, like a martyr in a Renaissance painting. At the same time he looked as though he had been thrust into an adult body before he was ready for it, not knowing what to do with his facial hair, which grew both long and short about his jowls. There was an electrical sensitivity to his face, the lips occasionally fluttered, the eyes sparked, glowed and dimmed repeatedly. Now and then he took deep breaths, as if trying to contain an emotion that was overspilling.

  ‘I loved the Papyrus Press,’ he said, almost the first words he’s spoken since they left the shop.

  Arnold didn’t say anything but smiled at what he took to be a sort of compliment. The boy went on, ‘They publish books using their own paper, hand-made by the woman in there. She produces special paper for each book.’

  Arnold chose not to remind him that he knew this already, as husband of the paper-maker and editor of the press. The boy had this curious ability to detach himself from commonly accepted knowledge. ‘My poems are all about paper. They would fit in so well.’

  He lifted the cup of black coffee to his lips, frowning. When he took a sip, he shuddered, grimaced.

  ‘That’s disgusting.’

  ‘What’s the matter? Too strong?’

  ‘It’s got no sugar in it.’

  ‘They said we had to have it without sugar.’

  ‘I can’t drink coffee without sugar.’

  ‘That’s the way we’re supposed to drink it, the woman said.’

  ‘So we have to do what she says?’

  Arnold saw that he would have to try and get some sugar – he called to the waitress, ‘Could we have some sugar? Please?’

  ‘It does corrupt the flavour – we do recommend . . .’

  ‘I understand that, but at the same time, we would like some sugar.’

  ‘Of course.’ Now it was the waitress who looked a little hurt, behind her smile. She returned, after what seemed too long a pause, with a little bowl of brown sugar cubes.

  The boy looked at them sulkily. Arnold suspected he was going to ask for white sugar. Instead he picked one up and put it in his coffee, performing the action clumsily so that the coffee splashed over the edge of his cup and dripped down the side.

  ‘So what sort of things do you paint?’

  The boy shook his head slightly, as if unable to believe the stupidity of his question.

  ‘I don’t paint things.’

  ‘You’re a sculptor?’

  The boy sat back and blew air from his lips exasperatedly.

  ‘I just make things with paper. Paper is the important thing.’

  ‘That paper suit looks like a work of art to me.’

  The boy flexed his arms and contemplated the smooth working of paper hinges.

  ‘My girlfriend did it for me. She’s in the fashion department.’

  Arnold felt a strong sense of relief when he discovered that the boy had a girlfriend.

  The boy drank his coffee again, he didn’t grimace this time, but still wasn’t satisfied.

  ‘It needs milk,’ he said, in a strangely cold little voice.

  ‘It’s fine without. You’ve got sugar . . .’

  ‘It needs milk. I can’t drink it without milk.’

  Arnold didn’t think to wonder why it was incumbent upon him to make the request for milk. The boy who’d staged a one-person street protest should have been quite capable of making the demand, but he was deliberately placing the onus on him as a sort of authority figure. You’ve brought me here, he seemed to be saying, so you sort out my coffee. Arnold called the waitress over again.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you again, could we have some milk for this young man’s coffee . . .’

  ‘Milk?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  The waitress couldn’t hide her disappointment, as she nodded and turned away. The boy called after her:

  ‘Warm milk.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I’d like warm milk – hot milk, please.’

  The waitress looked back at Arnold, as if she needed confirmation of this request, then back at the boy, then at the barista behind the bar, before walking off.

  ‘They bring a little jug of freezing milk, the coffee will be turned stone cold. It’s already cooled down a lot. Wasn’t exactly scalding when it arrived.’

  So now the boy was some sort of coffee connoisseur, thought Arnold, as he persisted with his own milkless cup.

  ‘So what do your parents think about it?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About you and art school. Do they approve?’

  ‘They don’t understand what I’m doing. They understand if they think I am learning how to design things. But I keep telling them I’m not doing that. I don’t want to design things.’

  ‘What do your parents do?’

  ‘What’s the point of talking about them?’

  ‘I’m just interested.’

  ‘Well I’m not.’

  ‘No?’

  The boy shrugged, and then made an effort to explain, ‘My mother’s just – she’s just a mother. The guy she lives with – I don’t really know what he does to be honest.’

  ‘What about your father?’

  ‘He pissed off when I was ten. I’ve stopped thinking about him.’

  Just a little while ago, Arnold was thinking, the young man before him had been a child. He tried to imagine the child he had been, in a toy-rich world, unconcerned about the publishing of poems, doted on, then sent into turmoil by the parental split-up. He wondered how much that episode had been responsible for the fragility of the thing that sat before him now, how easily it had replaced the perkiness and enthusiasm of the child with a talent for drawing with this thing of pain and nerves.

  He felt a sudden urge to feed the boy. The thinness of him, visible beneath the paper shell, was shocking. He was as thin as a letter.

  ‘Do you want something to eat, Martin?’

  ‘I don’t think they do food here.’

  ‘There were some cakes on the counter.’

  The boy shook his head in a slightly embarrassed way, as though Arnold had mentioned something he shouldn’t have. Martin spoke as if to cover this embarrassment. ‘I don’t need any advice about how to live my life.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to offer you any.’

  ‘And I don’t need any advice about how to write poems.’

  ‘The same, I wasn’t going to give you any.’

  ‘Then what’s the point of us talking?’

  ‘I wanted you to send me your poems again. Send me the manuscript. I want to have another look.’

  ‘Are you serious? After what you wrote on them, do you seriously think I would entrust them to you again?’

  ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t.’

  He noticed a subtle change in Martin’s demeanour. The brittleness had softened slightly. He had dropped his guard, despite his defiant words. Arnold had unashamedly touched the most sensitive part of him.

  ‘I’ve got better things to do with them,’ the boy said.

  ‘I don’t doubt that. All I’m asking for is the chance to read them again. I’m not saying I am going to publish them, we publish very little anyway. But I am only asking because I think I may have made a big mistake the first time I read them. And reading you – the poems you are wearing, even though your handwriting is terribly small, I can see there are some very beautiful things there.’
<
br />   Arnold, who hadn’t thought about her for well over an hour, suddenly realized that, had this boy not intervened, he would, at this moment, be fucking Vera in her husband’s bed. He felt a surge of guilt, the origin of which was the innocent presence of Martin, the boy. Arnold kept thinking of him as a boy but he was a young man, out in the world, away from his parents. Yet he had a childishness to him that was so easy to probe and manipulate, heartbreakingly so. A pureness of conscience that made Arnold wince when he considered the state of his own conscience.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the boy said. ‘I feel like you’re just going to trick me, or something.’

  Arnold moved his chair in readiness for departing. ‘Will you think about it?’ The boy gave a very small nod, barely more than a twitch of the head. ‘Do you want me to give you a lift anywhere? What about I take you to your college?’

  ‘No, I don’t want to go there, not today.’

  ‘Home then?’

  Martin agreed, in a dazed, blurry kind of way. He didn’t seem to know what had hit him. Even his paper suit was beginning to tear.

  They walked out of the cafe together and then to the multi-storey where Arnold’s car was parked. He drove him out to the western quarter, where all the grand houses had been converted into student bedsits and house-shares, the odd world that he had once inhabited, though in a different city, with kebab shops on every corner, charity shops everywhere, second-hand record shops. It was a part of town he rarely visited, to avoid the extra-mural encounters that could turn into out-of-hours tutorials. He had once gone in a pub round about here, when he was new to the city and to the job, a pub which had seemed charmingly peaceful and relaxed at first, but by the time he had finished his first pint he was surrounded by students, many of them his own, and they all thought it amazing and funny that their lecturer was in the pub that they regarded as their territory. He had tried his best to be friendly, and they worked hard at catching him off guard, and tried to get him drunk, and even offered him drugs, and in the end he had to do his best to make an inconspicuous exit. Now, driving under the boy’s direction, he felt a strange sense of envy, for the old ground of studenthood, with its easy come easy go atmosphere. He parked outside a shabby Edwardian terrace.

  ‘You could give me your poems now, if you like,’ said Arnold. ‘Are they in there? Do you have them?’

  The boy hesitated. ‘I don’t know. I need to think about it. What to do with them. You hurt me very bad. I don’t know if I should give them to you again.’

  ‘But,’ Arnold tried to moderate his tone, he was becoming a little frustrated, ‘in that case why were you picketing the shop? It looked to me like you were demanding to be reconsidered.’

  ‘No, I was just trying to draw attention to an injustice.’

  ‘But you do realize, don’t you, that you can’t just demand to be published, it doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘My poems have to be published, it’s vital. And they should have been published by Papyrus. They are the only publishers who understand paper. And Papyrus can only publish them if they love them, like I loved yours.’

  The conversation went on like this for a little while as they sat in the car. He managed, in the end, to extract from Martin a commitment to send Arnold his poems. Arnold for his part said he couldn’t promise anything, but that he would give them more time and consideration than perhaps he had done previously. In the meantime, he asked Martin to end his one-person protest outside Papyrus.

  The boy was out of the car now, his paper costume disintegrating, a loop of card that had clad an arm came unstuck and blew back in through the car window. The big sheet of cartridge that wrapped his torso had split. There was just bare skin beneath. The boy bent down to speak through the window.

  ‘You can’t make me do anything. I don’t have to do what you say.’ He uttered these words in such a tight voice it was like an act of ventriloquism, his lips hardly moving. He turned and walked to the house, a rambling building with overgrown privet almost blocking the path. He didn’t go in by the front door but disappeared round the side.

  Arnold looked at his watch. If he drove back to Vera’s now, he would have about thirty minutes before she would have to leave to pick up her littlest. They would not have time to make love, but he could spend at least a few minutes in her company, talking. But the traffic was bad and the minutes ticked away in his car. He gave up and went home.

  8

  There followed the week of half term during which Arnold and Vera both spent time at home with their children. Arnold felt a new phase was beginning in his relationship with his lover. His longing for Vera had been somehow diverted by his encounter with the boy in paper. When he thought about her, when he thought about her body, his thoughts were drawn away by the image of Martin Guerre as a wounded bird, his paper garments like white quills. He felt the boy to be a pinpoint of moral energy. When he looked again at his own poems, which now filled several cardboard folders, he felt almost ashamed of them. The hours he’d spent, folded up at his desk, scratching those lines out, then feeling too afraid to think of publishing them. It was unimaginable that he would ever think of wearing them like the boy had done, parade them down the street, hand them out to passers-by. Was it simply a lack of critical self-awareness that enabled the boy to make such bold moves with his poems? Or was it that he was somehow more deeply connected to the things he made, more deeply invested in them? He was like some of the young writers he taught, who thought the literary qualities of their writing was not the important thing. The important thing was that their poems existed at all. You couldn’t criticize a poem when it was an event of flesh and blood occupying physical space and time. All you could do was feel it. Energy. That was what he envied the boy, and others like him. His own creative life had fallen into little fragments, widely separated. There was no one to bolster him, no one to tell him to carry on, to keep going, to value the subtleties of thought and feeling and language that he had once felt he could master. Now all that mattered in poetry was the self, the physical self standing on a stage or in the street. The word made flesh.

  He thought of Vera in her house, round the other side of the park and beyond the local shops, looking after her own children. What thoughts was she having? With a reading week at the university coinciding with half term they were both housebound spouses, taking the burden of childcare while their other halves worked. Was she suffering? He needed to talk to her, he needed to fuck her, if just to break out of this spell the boy had cast.

  Polly reported that Martin Guerre had dropped his one-man protest outside her shop. ‘Whatever you said to him, it seems to have worked. What did you actually say to him? You didn’t threaten him, did you?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t threaten him. I just got him to talk, that’s all. He was obviously troubled about something, and taking it out on you. He’s got his parents on his back, and he was upset about his poetry. So I praised his poems. That seemed to cure him.’

  ‘Excellent. Now you just need someone to praise yours, and we’ll all be happy. Oh, that reminds me. Although he has stopped protesting, he did pop in yesterday, while I was out, and left this for you. Tamsin said it was urgent. Where is it?’ She looked among her work things which she kept in an alcove beside the kitchen, before finding the large padded envelope.

  Arnold felt both delight and dread. Delight that he had somehow managed to reach through to the boy’s vanities, dread that he would now have to read his stuff.

  ‘You know what it is?’

  ‘I asked him to resubmit his poems.’

  ‘Oh no, Arnold. This is what started the whole thing off. If you reject him again, he’ll come back worse than before. Do you realize this means we’ll have to publish him. I’m not having that boy standing outside my shop again, bullying my customers.’

  ‘OK, so we’ll publish him.’

  ‘And if we publish him we’ll have to deal with him. You know what it’s like, he’ll be on the phone all the time asking about w
hy we haven’t got his book reviewed in the Observer. And it’ll harm our reputation if we publish rubbish. On top of that we’d be doing a disservice to the boy – risking him being exposed to mockery and bad reviews . . .’

  ‘I seem to remember you were the one who suggested publishing him last week.’

  ‘That wasn’t a serious suggestion. I’d rather we broke any connection with him at all. Publishing him would tie him to us for ever.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not rubbish. And maybe he’ll quieten down if he thinks we’re taking his writing seriously. Who knows? I don’t think we have a choice.’

  Arnold took the unopened and unnervingly heavy envelope up to his office, and left it there.

  During the holiday he saw Vera twice. On the first occasion they both attended a children’s party that had an adult offshoot, where the parents sat around in a separate room to chat. He noticed Vera deliberately manoeuvre herself so that she didn’t have to sit next to Polly, and he noticed, with relief, how Polly thought nothing of this. Vera avoided his eyes with such efficiency he almost felt as if she were deleting him from her field of vision. At the same time, her concentrated avoidance was a visible token of their closeness. He cherished the way she refused to meet his eyes, even on the few occasions when he held the room’s attention with a remark or anecdote.

  He wished Polly hadn’t started talking about the boy in the paper suit, but it was a story that fascinated everyone, and the conversation kept returning to the subject, and Arnold had to add his own details.

  ‘It sounds to me like he could be seriously disturbed,’ said someone.

  ‘Bring him to a sewing evening, we’ll stitch something together for him to wear.’

  ‘People like that can be so unpredictable, how do you know what he’ll do next?’

  ‘Oh, he has clothes to wear, I don’t think he was dressed in paper because that’s all he had.’

  ‘He’s not dangerous, no, far from it. I think he is a simple, harmless soul.’