They got used to having to give the warped front door a shove as they turned the key. They observed damp blossoming in the walls. When they decided they could afford to re-cover the sofa, they chose a fabric neither of them liked.
Now and then something in Iris would rise up and she’d make a romantic gesture, the kind that was obvious and courtly, in the hope that David would meet her in it and their grace would be restored. She’d seen an old tiepin in a jeweller’s shop that kept coming to mind. It was a gold bar set with grey topaz, a stormy-looking stone that she loved. When it was placed in her hands, it seemed like something powerful enough to charm her careless husband.
She gave it to him one evening as they were getting into bed.
What’s this?
He lifted it out of its box.
A tiepin.
Why would I want a tiepin? I don’t wear ties.
It’s a beautiful thing that I wanted to give you.
Give me? What for?
He had gone blank, as he did when needing to deflect her. What is a tiepin? What is beautiful?
It’s grey topaz, she said. And gold.
David put the pin down next to its box and left it there. What was the trap? There had to be one. Every conversation with his wife felt like a trap these days. Why would she buy him something like that? Especially now. The next day Iris put it away in his desk. Neither mentioned it again.
Then David stopped locking doors or closing anything – a cupboard, a drawer, a book. Iris unpacked shopping onto the table and left it there, the empty bags included. She started to open envelopes and then dropped them back on the mat. Her migraines increased. Most Saturdays she left him to cope with the girls while she lay in the dark wondering if she was making her illness up. She felt so much pain that she couldn’t tell.
Dropping plates and walking over dresses, she took his unreliability as insult and then as attack. One day she was sitting at the kitchen table with three friends when David came in, said hello, took a beer from the fridge and went to get a glass.
Close the door, Iris said, pointing at the fridge.
David took his time choosing a glass and pouring the beer.
Close the door.
He could have reached back with his hand and done so but now that she had asked, he wouldn’t. Iris’s friends left soon after.
Who am I to you? she asked him.
I don’t know.
Why can’t you say something?
I just did.
Not that.
What, then? What is it you want me to say?
I’m not going to hand you a fucking script.
He had sex now and then with women he met through work. They were often young, though this wasn’t what attracted him most. He was drawn to a tautness that wasn’t just physical: a bouncing energy that made him think of porpoises. These women swam through his fantasies and slipped out of his arms. They thought they were being sophisticated and perhaps they were. They knew they’d never become like his generation with all its wreckage and compromise.
When Iris came to one of David’s work events, she sometimes encountered a woman who, it was clear, was either flirting or sleeping with him. Iris, too, thought of porpoises – their fixed faces, elastic responses and urgent repetitions. Don’t pity me, she wanted to say, but they did. They thought she was sad because her husband didn’t desire her any more. They couldn’t yet imagine defining happiness any other way.
The last time Iris went to one of these events she had been talking to a man she vaguely knew when she mentioned David and they both looked across the room at him. At that moment, a woman carrying a tray of food made her way past David and, as she did so, rubbed her hip in a confident leisurely way against his body. The fact that he did not react, the complacent expression on the woman’s face, told Iris everything.
Don’t you find it insulting? the man said.
Sometimes strangers give themselves permission to speak of what they see. As if coming from someone unknown, the words mean nothing. He realised that Iris was shocked, and apologised and hurried away.
At that point the woman with the tray appeared and introduced herself, saying that she worked with David and how lovely it was to meet Iris and that no, she wasn’t a professional cook but just did this to help out. It was fun. And Iris smiled and said nothing because she felt nothing and that was what had shocked her.
*
Their nights were long interrogations of words neither meant about actions neither intended. But there were also truthful exchanges.
Why do you fuck other women? Iris asked once while they were making the bed.
David thought hard before answering.
To bring myself, us, this, back to life.
But it’s what’s killing us.
Is it.
That was when she had taken off her ring. David had never worn one.
a pattern
David tells people that Iris threw him out but the truth is that she asked him to go to stay at his sister’s after their last conversation about Sandra. He and Sandra had grown up together. When she took a job with an arts foundation in the city, their paths started to cross. Iris had met her a few times and thought there was something compensatory in how attentive she’d been. What do you need? Iris wanted to ask. What did Iris need? Not to know. Until, quite suddenly, she did.
David kept his phone in his pocket and beside him at night. Iris had the strong feeling that if she looked she would find something and so she didn’t. She tried to concentrate on their life as a happy one and in many ways it was. They were often a happy family. Iris and David still had interesting things to tell one another and they went on having good sex. Her body kept telling her things but she’d got used to the pain and set whatever she noticed aside until one day she couldn’t.
Did anything happen between you and Sandra?
David’s answer swerved across her question.
I’ve known her forever.
I don’t mean now, I mean—
She’s got a four-year-old son.
I know that. That’s not what I’m talking about. I just wondered—
The father is involved, you know.
I didn’t ask about the father.
Iris retreated but she waited. Sandra employed David from time to time as an advisor or tutor, and just when he was about to set up a seminar programme for her, he came home and said that he would no longer be working for the foundation.
Have you fallen out with Sandra?
We can’t work together. She’s mad.
But something must have happened.
Alright. It did. She wanted us to have an affair.
And what did you say?
She’s mad.
That’s what you said?
Of course not. I said of course not – because I’m married to you, aren’t I? I don’t know. She got really angry and so we can’t, can we?
Work together or have an affair?
Iris was seeing things she hadn’t before because now they made a pattern. David’s elaborate justification for some disappearance or delay. Calling her in the afternoon when he was away to pre-empt her calling at night. The condoms that turned up years after they stopped using them. And then there was how David had spoken of Sandra. He’d called her mad. There were other women, ones Iris had wondered about, that David had called mad. Did this mean he’d slept with them too? Who is he? Iris wondered more and more. Who are you?
She was seeing anything in anything. The way he hesitated before answering basic questions. Which train? Where did you eat? Why it took him so long to buy bread. Why he was late or forgot or looked past her. Was she mad too?
Her anger became so deep that she could only risk letting it out in small bursts of temper. The last time they did anything together as a family had been on Iris’s birthday. David said he’d book her favourite restaurant but when they arrived, it turned out he hadn’t. They waited thirty minutes for a table. Iris silenced herself until the end of the
meal when the bill came and David passed it to her and then took it back saying that it was a joke. When the waiter left, she began.
It wasn’t a fucking joke.
She saw the girls flinch but knew she would let herself continue.
And you didn’t forget to book a table. You couldn’t be bothered.
Lou grabbed Kate’s hand. David pushed his chair back and threw out his arms in a giant shrug. Iris was gripping the table so as not to slap his face.
It was too much to ask, wasn’t it? Even though you offered, you couldn’t bring yourself to—
Stop it! yelled Lou. Just stop it!
It took Iris a moment to realise that Lou meant her.
*
At Christmas they’d gone to David’s parents as usual. Kate and Lou came to life and disappeared off with their cousins. David lay down on a bench in the kitchen. Later he would lie on the sofa or the floor. This had nothing to do with his illness. He had come home and was fifteen again and needed to lie down. David’s parents were particularly kind to Iris, which made her want to lie down too.
David was the son of a couple who adored each other and who liked their children to be ornamental and undemanding. They owned a packaging business and David liked to say that the only thing they taught him was the importance of wrapping things up nicely. He left home at eighteen and got a job as a window dresser. He said for some years that he was going to be a theatre designer and then he got to the age where people stop talking about what they’re going to become. This did not trouble him. He moved lightly through life, not expecting anchorage he’d never known.
One evening David’s father mentioned Sandra.
Her parents were here for a drink last week. They said how nice it had been to see David in Berlin.
Berlin? Iris queried and then made herself say, Ah yes, Berlin.
She waited until they were in bed.
So when did you and Sandra go to Berlin?
She watched him scrambling to put an answer together.
We didn’t go to Berlin.
Liar.
Not together. She needed some last-minute help. Surely you remember? It was work. Her parents were there to look after the boy. I went overnight or something. I was barely there, come to think of it. That big project. Surely you remember?
No, I don’t remember. When was this?
Last year? The year before?
Which?
How should I know? It was one of the many tedious and badly paid little jobs I do that you show no interest in. You think I went there because I wanted to? For fun?
I think you went there to fuck Sandra.
You’re mad.
Iris stopped listening. Her mind was scanning the last two years. She was in so much pain that she wanted to smash herself and so when David reached out and pulled her to him, she let him. More than that, she wanted him to.
We are bound together by dark patterns as well as light. We choose someone who makes us feel and so feeling arises and it can’t all be good. David would turn her back on herself until she felt obliged to put her anger away. It was how he moved them past every crisis he provoked. But the pattern had worn itself out. Iris could not go through it again.
I want you to leave. You have to leave. Just leave.
Where am I supposed to go?
I don’t know. Your sister’s?
She had said this not knowing if she meant it. Such a pattern depends on those involved remaining within the bounds of their part. This makes the pattern particularly clear and so it becomes a way of steadying things that are not. It’s familiar and predictable, and sometimes that’s what is most required, however painful. But Iris had broken the pattern. Into what?
When they got home, David packed a bag and went to his sister’s because that was where Iris told him to go. She assumed he’d be back in a week but when he returned it was to pack another bag. He considered the cramped house, his angry wife, his fractious daughters, the damp walls and warped doors, and left as soon as he could.
They settled into another pattern, with David spending two evenings a week at the house with Kate and Lou, which he presented as a favour to Iris. One weekend in three he took the girls to stay with his parents. Months passed and the relief he’d been feeling hardened into loneliness. He found he wasn’t interested in sleeping with other women any more. He wanted Iris.
One day it seemed as if she wanted him too. She had to ask for his help because she had a migraine and could not so much as raise her head from the pillow. He’d come over and had a good day with the girls, bringing Iris exactly what she needed because he knew. He cleared up her vomit, put her in a bath, changed her nightclothes and sheets, and she did not feel ashamed because it was him. Then he lay down beside her and held her and she slept better than she had since he’d gone.
When she woke, she was still in his arms. He had been waiting to ask her something.
How long is this going to take?
What?
This punishment. I’ve done what you asked. Four months camping out at my sister’s. I haven’t lived with my children for four months. Isn’t that enough?
It’s not a question of—
I’ve been waiting, god knows why, for your permission to return and now—
But you haven’t tried to restore anything. You haven’t even wanted to talk.
About what? Sandra? Something that happened years ago?
But I only just found out about it. And it wasn’t just Sandra, was it?
So what? You knew. We didn’t talk about it but you knew.
In that moment she made herself look back on all she’d turned away from and there it was.
I’m not punishing you, she said.
What was the point in making me leave, then?
What you did was real. What it made me feel was real. What happens now has to be real.
She had not turned towards him but nor had she made any attempt to free herself. They continued to lie there, each waiting for the other to make something happen. Meanwhile another day began.
And then it was almost summer and Iris, who was so tired, was about to tell David to come back when she walked through a doorway beside a stranger and they turned towards each other and they said yes.
the interrupted city
Much of the city could be described as historical. There are buildings, monuments and other landmarks that have been here so long that no one questions their permanence. We make what use of them we can. We have repurposed our libraries, fire stations, churches, warehouses, butchers and pubs. We no longer require guildhalls, telephone boxes, docks or ballrooms and turn them into other things while still calling them what they were. We navigate the city by churches and fish markets just as we give emotions names that belong to a simpler time, if there ever was one.
There has been so little rain that autumn has begun already. The parks are yellow. Leaves start to collect in the streets. A desert wind brings a knife-edge of heat and fine red sand that’s invisible in the air but coats every surface. People are burnt and thirsty and bored by the empty sky. They want the next thing to happen.
For weeks, Iris and Raif have been exchanging messages. He thanks her for showing him the cloud mirror and sends an article he’s come across about another merman. He does not say that Helen has moved in. For Raif this is an aside. He only intends it to be a temporary solution. She’s been living at the top of the house of friends who’re getting divorced. And why not live together? As other men remark, women too, Helen is lovely.
When he hopes Iris is having a good summer, she mentions that she’s never liked summer and that’s it, they’ve interrupted themselves and enlarged their conversation. They settle into a rhythm of communicating every few days and the murmurs that underlie their correspondence – still about archives and accession numbers – start to be heard. I want. I might. Will you. Could we. I can’t stop thinking. I can’t stop.
The messages are a counterpoint to the disappointments of each day an
d the fears that are forming. I want her to move out. I have to take him back. They’re afraid because something has been fixed. Iris cannot return to who she was before she met Raif and retreated from David. Raif cannot contemplate Helen without seeing Iris, however vaguely, behind her.
From up on the hill you can see that the city has no overall argument. It’s not a series of avenues or a grid of blocks and so the best way to walk from one place to another is rarely obvious. Despite all the possibilities, most stick to a small number of paths which they follow with minor variations.
We follow paths we know too well to notice they are gone. Iris is walking over a bridge towards an office block she’s known for thirty years and suddenly she isn’t sure where it is. There are so many others now. And where did that gravel garden come from? Those trees? She takes her usual shortcut but meets a locked gate. She wonders if it has always been there, if she’s imagined the shortcut and never noticed the gravel.
She’s late and tries to make her way back to the bridge but this place has never been a starting point. She doesn’t know where to go. She gets out her phone and turns the map round and round. Where is she? A woman walks past and Iris almost asks her for help even though she can’t believe she needs it. The woman was about to stop anyway because Iris looks so lost and, like anyone interrupted, so revealed.
the merman
In September, just as day and night are levelling, it rains for days. Across the land, towns are afloat and farms are at sea. The city was not designed for this recent weather of tempests and monsoons and so pipes erupt, roads are sheeted with water, gutters overflow. But most of the city’s water remains hidden. It collects and moves slowly, if at all, along canals, sewers, and rivers that have sunk to gullies and then further into the earth. Yet it is water that opens up the city. When it rains, light spills.
Raif makes his way to the college pool, which is in the basement of a building that’s to be sold the following year. The changing room is a clash of mildew and disinfectant. He touches as little as possible of the spongy matting and sticky wood, and climbs gingerly into the pool. It would surprise those who know him to see him in the water. He is sure, fast and strong, so absorbed and intent that other swimmers are forced to move round him. He swims length after length in an exalted state of pure momentum, which doesn’t end when he gets out of the pool. He feels as if he’s accelerating towards something he might describe as joy. Where this idea has come from, he will not yet admit. Outside it is still raining. He dresses without bothering to dry himself properly and cycles home in his shirt, taking his time and accepting every drop.
In the City of Love's Sleep Page 7
