In the City of Love's Sleep

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  He invites her to meet some of his colleagues to discuss her possible involvement in a debate about the conservation of objects. It’s the last week of term and the group move on to a nearby pub. Raif’s head of department arrives and sits down beside them.

  So, Raif, she says, this debate you’re organising will pitch conservation against digital archive?

  It was the students’ idea. They want to argue for and against the letting go of objects. Rather than trying to salvage or preserve them to the extent that they are no longer themselves.

  And whose side are you on? She is addressing Iris.

  She’s mine, says Raif.

  He sounds matter-of-fact but his meaning flares.

  The objects, says Iris. I’m on the side of the objects. That’s why I’m here. To discuss the debate.

  Raif and Iris don’t need to look at, or even speak to, one another. They both have that feeling of being side by side. They think it’s safe to enjoy their connection in this silent way. Nothing has happened, no one can see anything. Or can they?

  Oh, says the woman. I thought when he said you were his, he meant that you are together. That you are a couple.

  She is so blunt and inexpressive that Iris can detect no mischief. But who would say such a thing out loud? Were she and Raif about to say what they thought too? That he had been deliberately ambiguous and it had delighted her?

  No, says Iris, who cannot control her smile. Not that. No.

  The woman is neither perturbed by her mistake nor particularly interested. She had cast about for conversation with a stranger and there it had been. She talks a little more to Iris about her work at the museum and then turns to someone else.

  Iris says she should be going and Raif takes her up to his office, where she left her bag. They are talking – about what? – when his hand reaches out and touches her cheek as if testing the surface of something extremely frail. She will remember how solemn he looks as he does this and how she feels herself take on the same gravity.

  They have stepped aside into another dimension where he reaches out past grief and loss and touches her. In that other place she hears herself asking Shall I leave you now? And him saying Yes.

  the towers

  There is a day in early December when snow falls but so lightly that it’s gone before it reaches the ground. Scribbles form and melt all the dark afternoon.

  When David phones and asks if he can come round to talk, Iris is surprised to find that she’s relieved. The last year falls away, Raif with it, as they settle down with a bottle of wine. It’s as if he never left and had no reason to and she knows what he’s going to say.

  I can’t do it, he begins.

  Iris feels as if she’s taking up the ground from beneath her feet but she makes herself say it.

  You can come back.

  David looks calm but he is starting to cry.

  I can’t, he says. I can’t.

  Iris is shaking her head. She doesn’t understand. He tries to explain.

  I did what you asked. I left. And I’ve been here for the girls. Have you ever thought what it’s like for me coming back twice a week, into what was my home, being with my children and then having to leave again?

  For her, he is simply there or not there. She hasn’t dared imagine what the hours of his days are like, let alone his nights. Why has it not occurred to her that being placed outside your life might have its own effect? She thinks of her mother placing her father outside their life and how she has done this to her husband too. Only David has done things to place himself outside. Perhaps that’s why he did them. They are both crying now. David has never found it so difficult to speak.

  I can see now that I haven’t got … we haven’t got … we can’t … there’s been too much …

  She sits back and considers him. He looks sad but determined, brave even. Perhaps he always has been but the hundred Davids who have disappointed or enraged her have stood in the way. I did love him, she thinks as all the Irises who have obstructed her heart step back.

  At last it has come to an ending. They sit there in silence. They do not need to speak of anything more right now.

  *

  The city rises up around them. It has been described as a place through which we move – travelling towards, away from or past one another. Even endings are moved through as if they were punctuation rather than conclusion. But the city is also a place of arrest. We have to negotiate its traffic and its architecture as well as each other. And there are always too many of us, moving too slowly, encumbered, perhaps lost.

  An ending is built after the fact, just like a beginning. It can take years. Detail has to pass into memory, feeling into story, so that what we recall is brightly painted, sturdily constructed, accessible, predictable and satisfactory. We can point to it from far away and others can see it clearly. Like the tallest towers in the city, from a certain distance our beginnings and endings are all that can be seen.

  the heart

  The museum has acquired a state-of-the-art cardiac-patient simulator. This is a dummy moulded onto a resuscitation bed, the body reduced to site. His face is convincing, he’s even got hair. You can take his pulse in his wrist and his breath can be expressed in six different sounds but otherwise he’s reduced to the parts on which the doctors will focus. He ends at the hips and his groin is smooth.

  This heart is designed to be probed, wired, recorded and shocked. It can present with ten standardised scenarios and fifty different conditions including high or low pressure and a variety of blockages and troubling rhythms.

  We rely on the continuous onward momentum of the heart and want above all not to notice it. If we do, we believe it to be precarious. We don’t think of it as its true brute self but as a flutter, a patter. It can also pound and ache, jump, leap, cry out or bleed. It can be heavy, cold or sore, warm, full or broken. A heart can be left somewhere or given away. It can be gold, stone or ice; pure, empty or open. Perhaps because it is so invested, we can only think of it as a simple shape. We see hearts everywhere and seek them out. We share pictures of heart-shaped pebbles, petals, cupcakes and sunglasses. Clouds, forests, fireworks and lakes appear heart-shaped. We point at them and say Look, a heart!

  Raif’s heart is a series of small consolidations. Iris’s heart, so tightly layered, is no more easily navigable. The cartoon shape is the one we find easiest to grasp and remember. It is not, on the whole, a reflection of the way we feel.

  glare

  David takes the girls to his parents for Christmas. This seems right to Iris. It’s what they’re used to and enjoy. She tells them brightly that she’ll spend the day with friends and has prepared more detail, only they don’t ask for it. They want to know that she’ll be alright but no more than that or they might not be able to believe her.

  Iris has had several invitations but the prospect of inserting herself into other people’s Christmases or proving herself good value exhausts her. So she tells her friends she’s going home to her mother and her mother that she’ll be with friends. On the day she’s restless. She’s enjoying the space that she’s contrived but does not know how to fill it.

  Where is Raif? For the first time she wonders what he’s doing at a particular moment. She decides that he is with his mother at a large and otherwise empty table. The badly cooked food is almost untouched. His mother tries to start a conversation but he doesn’t respond because he can’t stop thinking about Iris. Any minute now he’ll leave the table and go into the garden to call to wish her Happy Christmas and then, when he discovers she’s alone, he’ll jump into his car and drive back to the city and they’ll spend the rest of the day in bed, spilling champagne on the sheets and undoing delightful parcels wrapped in tissue paper and tied with ribbons.

  Christ. She knows so little about him that this is all her mind can come up with. But it’s what she wants. Someone who will travel towards her with such momentum and certainty that she can do nothing to resist. The moment he reached out and touched he
r face felt as powerful as if he’d driven a hundred miles to declare his love. Why did she ask if she should leave and why did he say yes?

  Her phone doesn’t ring. By early afternoon she needs to escape this waiting and so drives out of the city. She stops at a service station. They’re serving a Christmas special and she takes it, saying to the man behind the counter that she’ll be eating another Christmas meal tonight when I get there. She is trying to appear on her way somewhere. She even makes herself hurry.

  *

  Raif’s mother assumes he will join her for Christmas and he does not contradict her. He tells Helen that this is an obligation and he’s sure she wants to see her family too, so why don’t they have a meal on Christmas Eve? Rosa is back for a week, and she and her partner will be joining them as well as a couple of Spanish actors Helen’s been working with.

  Why not come on Christmas Eve? his mother asks. Sorcha and Neil will drop in for a bite before midnight mass, the triplets too.

  I’m just—

  Too sad, his mother assumes. Even though it’s now more than two years since Liis died, she explains Raif to herself in terms of grief. He hasn’t yet mentioned Helen.

  Christmas Eve is convivial. Everyone brings a dish they grew up with and they all tell stories and Raif feels as happy as he does when the triplets come to stay. Like then his home is full of life that requires no effort to sustain it. They eat devils on horseback, almond soup, paella, curry and roti, and bûche de Noël. Raif relishes it all but he’s not thinking, as Helen is, that this is their first Christmas together and what that might mean.

  Rosa pulls out her phone to photograph the food.

  Who made the devils on angels, these things, whatever they’re called? You, Raif? Line up.

  She wants everyone standing beside their dish and takes pictures of them all. One of the actors asks for a picture of his hosts and the other goes to get Helen from the kitchen.

  A photo of the lovely couple, please! A souvenir! The lovely couple!

  Helen lets them move her into position next to Raif, beside a pretty Japanese screen that is hers and just as their guests raise their phones to picture the lovely couple, Raif steps behind the screen. They pause.

  What are you doing, Raif?

  Everyone can hear Helen’s desperation.

  It’s a joke! he says but doesn’t step back.

  Rosa moves quickly to stand beside Helen.

  We are the lovelier couple, surely!

  And they all laugh and take a picture and the moment passes.

  On Christmas morning Raif and Helen exchange presents and go for a walk.

  That was a lovely evening, she says. Our friends got on so well.

  The food was delicious but there’s so much left over.

  It was sweet of Alberto to want a photo of us.

  Was it? I thought he was just being polite. I mean, we barely know them.

  I’ve been working with them for weeks. We’re friends.

  You hadn’t mentioned them before.

  I had. You just don’t—

  Is she going to say it? And is she then going to press him about his joke? That moment will remain with Helen forever because when she stepped into place beside Raif and faced the smiling room she had thought At last. But today she says nothing and when her brother arrives to pick her up she tells him what a great evening they had and asks Raif to give his mother her love. She’s lent him her car to drive down there.

  Raif watches a film and picks at leftovers, putting off leaving even though he knows his mother is alone. He’s told her he is keeping a colleague company, someone in the city without family, and will arrive mid-afternoon. They always have their Christmas meal in the early evening anyway.

  He drives west towards the sun. Its heart, so absent and so intense, touches him. As the sun drops and deepens, the horizon rises in a blazing line. What must those passing make of this man who swerved off the road into a lay-by and is standing there in his shirtsleeves on this freezing day, taking picture after picture of an ordinary sky? And if they could see that he’s weeping, would they understand?

  where are you where I am?

  Watch Iris and Raif as, over the weeks of midwinter, they leave for work and return home in the dark. Absorbed by the idea of each other, they notice the city only as backdrop. The streets are mysterious. Glimpses of towers and spires, sun and moon, punctuate the drama they now inhabit. They do not think about how many rooms are empty, those who have no room, and all the doors that are closed.

  They meet by the river to discuss the forthcoming debate and decide that as it is a rare bright day, they should walk. They are their most graceful selves – measured, solemn and delighting. The detail of what has passed between them already seems so rich. It’s as if they’re being spun into something. Anything can be spun out of so much water and light. They pause on a bridge and lean over the rail, shoulder to shoulder, staring pointlessly at the water. The sun swivels its low beam to blind them and they only feel more.

  *

  They’re walking off the bridge in that lemony light, almost holding hands, when Raif’s phone rings. He’s baffled – his phone never rings – and then pleased because it will seem to Iris that it often does. Hello! he says too cheerfully and then Hello, less certainly, and Oh god and I see and Of course and How and When.

  Iris stands beside him watching the day contract into someone receiving terrible news. When the call ends he stands there looking past her. It’s a while before he can speak.

  He was my friend. I hadn’t seen him for years. I had no idea.

  Well, I’m your friend, she says, taking his hand. What can I do?

  The man who has died was a cultural historian who’d been a friend of Raif’s father’s. The grief Raif now feels is out of all proportion to their connection and has to do with many things. The historian had encouraged Raif’s interests and guided him towards his career, but they’d met only occasionally and hadn’t stayed in touch.

  Iris is the person who is there, holding his hand. She will help him through this. She mentions that she also knew the historian (he’d taught a course during her degree) and that they’d met at the museum once or twice. She asks if Raif would like her to come with him to the funeral. He does not say no.

  *

  On the day, Iris is late. Her card is rejected at the station so she walks to a cash machine that’s not working. She decides to drive, which shouldn’t take long but there are roadworks and diversions and every light hits red. There’s a truck of scaffolding being unloaded, a medical emergency, a police cordon, wavering cyclists and dustbin lorries. All this she turns, as it’s happening, into a story she will tell Raif. I was late, she will say, and then regale him with the comic detail of her calamitous journey and he will be grateful for her determination to be there to support him. He will take her hand.

  As she gets near the crematorium she tries to follow the map on her phone but it keeps freezing and readjusting and is slow to give street names. Not that there are many signs. How could she have lived for so long in the city and have no idea how to navigate this part of it?

  The funeral has begun and the crematorium is full so she finds a place at the back. She cannot help but look for Raif and there he is. When they stand, Iris remembers his grief and wants to move forward and let him know she’s there but at that moment the woman beside him leans against him and he leans back. Iris watches. She could be your sister. I don’t even know if you have a sister. If she’s a friend, is she a friend like me? Someone you fall into place with from time to time? Do you stand side by side in rooms? Does it feel special? Do you approach one another as if about to share a secret? Do you fuck?

  At this point she stops herself. This is someone’s funeral and she isn’t even there to mourn. What made her think Raif needed her? Afterwards she tries to leave as quickly as possible but bumps into someone she knows and when she’s free to leave again, Raif appears. The woman is beside him and he introduces them. It is of co
urse Helen, although Iris has been refusing to recognise her. She has that bouncy hair pinned up and anyway why would Iris remember her? Helen starts to say that they’ve met before when Iris interrupts.

  I was late.

  She says it because those are the words that have been kept waiting on the tip of her tongue.

  Helen ignores this and asks how Iris knew the historian. She exaggerates their connection so as to explain her presence and then she wants to go.

  My husband is taking care of the girls but I can’t leave him alone with them too long. He has MS, you see.

  Helen softens.

  Your husband? I’m so sorry. That’s awful.

  She doesn’t notice the jolt that passes through Raif. Later she will say how awful it must be for that poor woman to be coping with two children and a husband with MS. Raif will say nothing.

  It is what it is, says Iris. Lovely to see you both.

  She hurries away.

  *

  Someone comes into view and everything around them recedes. You have to isolate them like this in order to see them clearly. It’s part of the enchantment and only when their life steps forward do you remember where this is taking place – in two as yet separate lives. Iris and Raif are such a small part of each other’s lives. Now they will start to ask not only Where are you? but Where are you where I am?

  Iris wakes, burning, at three a.m. She’d thought she was being brave, trusting the bond between them, and that her being at the funeral would mean something to him. Had he said he wanted her to come? He was just too polite to say no. Why had she thought he needed her? They hardly knew one another.

  He’d never said he had a girlfriend. All he’d said was that his wife was dead. So the girlfriend couldn’t be that important but why had he not made things clear? Why was nobody ever clear?

  She wakes an hour later and says aloud that she used a funeral as a place to meet Raif, and David’s illness as a shield. And Raif was not who she thought he was. He’d made a fool of her. Liar. Fucking liar.