Tell my mum, said Kate. Make her understand.
*
When Iris arrives, the girls are so righteous that she forgets to be cross with them.
They said we could see him.
If you said we could.
You just need to say we can.
We know what he’ll be like, remember? We’ve seen it online.
They are ten and twelve years old and think that they know the world because they’ve seen it. They’ve looked at brain scans and read about miracles. They’ve watched a man drilling into his own head and a woman talk about how she tried to chop off her arm because it didn’t belong to her.
Iris speaks to the doctor and agrees that they can see David. They’re taken through a series of doors to another room where armchairs and side tables are lined up along two walls. A nurse goes to collect David and there he is, their father, only he’s quite different. He’s not like any of the people they saw online. His face isn’t lopsided and he doesn’t limp. But he’s wearing funny clothes and looks really tired and he needs a haircut. Lou and Kate watch as the nurse leads him to a chair. The nurse goes to the door but doesn’t leave. Iris hopes the girls won’t ask why.
No one moves. Iris thought the girls would rush to him but they stay in their chairs. They pull out their phones and don’t look up again.
Iris stops herself telling them to say hello, to give him a kiss, but she tries to encourage them by going to kiss David herself. His hand moves towards her breast as she steps away.
Hello, David. I brought Kate and Lou to see you.
Kate and Lou, he says.
The sedation means that each word takes its time but his voice is still his voice.
Hello, Daddy, mutters Kate, still not looking up. Lou follows in quick echo.
Kate and Lou, he says again.
And then only raw noise as a spasm goes through his body.
Iris looks to the nurse, who has taken a step forward but makes a reassuring gesture with his hand.
Don’t worry, Iris says to the girls. Sometimes we have feelings we can’t express, especially if we’re having trouble with words.
It is David who responds.
Trouble with words. We worry. Kate and Lou.
I think what your father means is—
Can we go now? asks Lou.
Kate is already on her feet.
Can we go back to that other room and get a drink?
Hello, Daddy! He barks it and, sliding down his chair, splays his legs and scratches his balls.
The girls freeze. Iris has to push them out of the room.
*
David is never going to be alright and he is never coming home and Iris needs to make this real. She opens his filing cabinet and hauls its contents onto the floor. She’s not going to look at anything, just box it up quickly and put it away. But there are cards and notes tucked among bank statements, photographs too. They’re at least ten years old. Not because David stopped what he did but because all that flirting and murmuring went online.
Lou comes into the room and stands between Iris and the heap of paper.
Why are you throwing everything away?
We need space.
What for?
I don’t know. In case Granny comes to stay?
She never does. No one does. Why don’t they?
Lou is frightening herself as well as Iris. Why can’t she stop herself saying these things? Words bubble up and escape her and they hurt her mother and that is awful but also why she says them. She needs to hurt her mother.
I’m using this desk now, says Iris. It was mine, you know, originally. I need it for when I work at home.
But you work in the museum or the stores.
If you were sick or off school, I’d have to work at home. That’s what single parents do.
You’re not single.
Iris is kneeling on the floor in front of this terrible truth-telling daughter.
And you shouldn’t go through his things, says Lou as she walks out. They’re private.
*
Two weeks later Iris takes the girls to see him again. They sit there playing games on their phones. David looks only at Iris, who talks and talks. She tells him about the objects she’s working on, how the weather has been so strange and who has been appointed to run the gallery he hates so much. Expressions pass across his face half-formed. He might be about to smile or cry or speak but he doesn’t.
After ten minutes the girls ask if they can go and get a drink. They take Iris’s money without looking at David. She knows they won’t come back and that they’ll want her to bring them again in a few weeks’ time.
She asks the nurse to leave her and David alone for a minute, which he does. There are so many things to say.
I said you could come back, David. Even after everything. And you said – you said – and we agreed. We were ended. We’d decided and agreed but we didn’t say. So no one knows and they think I’m just—
Pain is spiralling out of her and where is David to stop it? He was the one who stopped it. But he cannot divert, console or fuck her now. She starts to repeat herself, shouting because he seems so far away. In the end she’s just making noise.
David keeps staring at her, drowsily astonished that the lovely woman is here again, although she’s being quite tiring. What is this question? What is the answer? He doesn’t know what she wants him to say. In the end he shrugs.
Iris sees a familiar gesture: the shrug that evaporated the panic she’d felt on the train stuck in the tunnel, that lightened her mood and made things possible, that meant it was alright not to say yes or no as there were other more interesting responses. But it was also the shrug that deflected her first enquiry – Have you slept with someone else? – and that met her questions about what they were going to do about childcare or the leaking roof or the fact that he didn’t have a proper job. It was an affectation and it was all that was left of him. The most real thing about him – a shrug.
She’s wrong. David really doesn’t know and is trying his best to say so.
the jealousy glass
We see with two eyes and receive two images but compound them into one. We need to be as definite as we can about where we are and what’s around us. But what if we can see in more than one way at once? Does this enlarge the picture or confuse it?
Iris and Raif are living in a time of glances, when eyes flit and etiquette is lax. It’s easy, perhaps too easy, for us to look wherever we want. We don’t look for too long at another person unless we’re trying to communicate interest or hostility, either to a heightened degree. Three hundred years ago the atmosphere in a room would have been more formal, more fraught. Public space was an opportunity for concealed communication. (Go out into the city and you will see that it still is.) Consider all that can happen in a crowded room.
The jealousy glass looks like nothing much: a small telescope used to see the action onstage more closely. The one in the museum, early eighteenth century, is fashioned from dark ivory and has a sharkskin case. It looks designed for discretion, being dull and unadorned. The image enters through a hole in the side and is deflected by a mirror onto the lens: by which she could take a View of any Person she pleased without his having the least Suspicion of it, as the Glass was directed quite another Way.
We are aware when crossing the city that our image is being fixed continually by cameras – those we see and those we don’t. To a large extent we must set this aside just as we cannot always wonder what someone might have glimpsed in us. But we still don’t expect to be observed by someone who has turned away. Or to be able to pursue someone while averting our gaze. How much more potent they become. Perhaps it’s safer not to be able to see them at all.
whose story?
Raif is determining his life with Helen. He wants it to be calm and complete. He has come to the end of Liis’s death at last and realises he’s glad that Helen is still here. He can see how withheld he has been because now he isn’t. He’s rea
ching out of himself, wanting contact so that he can go on building feeling. He swims each morning in the dilapidated college pool and carries its rhythm into his day so that life feels relaxed and generous. He’s happy in a way he can’t remember having been and easily satisfied. Things taste, feel and sound good.
Since last summer I have been coming back to life, he thinks, and then wonders if he’s ever felt as alive before. He gathers up this happiness and tries to apply it to Helen.
She’s touring with a drama group that visits prisons and he makes a point of turning up at both the showcase and the farewell party. The other actors tell Helen how proud Raif looks and it’s true that he stands beside her, for the first time, as if he feels lucky to be there. He takes her to buy a new bed and doesn’t correct the salesman who calls her your wife. He asks after her friends and remembers her stories. And he likes her to go with him to see Bridget, who now treats him like a stranger. He cries in front of Helen about how this makes him feel and she’s able to console him.
One day he receives a message.
Hello, shadow man. I arrive on Friday. I will be wearing my silver coat and I have a story to tell. You promised me cherry blossom, remember?
It takes Raif a moment to realise that this is from the woman in the silver coat. He hasn’t thought about her for months.
Ava is older than him – five or fifteen years, he can’t tell. She’s a professor of economics, recently widowed or is it divorced? He remembers a fine figure in a plum-coloured dress, chestnut hair put up in a complicated knot and a strong sexual gravity. When they met in that bar, they flirted intensively for a couple of hours and then Raif felt so sad and drunk that he’d started to cry. He told her about Liis and her father’s defection, and how he didn’t know if it really was her story.
Do you need to know? Ava asked.
I think so.
Then why not try to find out?
The decision he’d made not to confront Liis, not to break the surface on which they built their life, had hardened into a belief. It was not possible.
When the bar closed, he offered to walk Ava home but she said that as he had no idea where he was, she would walk him back to his hotel instead. She buttoned her silver coat and slipped her arm through his. At the hotel she kissed his cheek, accepted his card and turned to go. He could not let her.
Ava! he called after her.
She stopped and turned. He had no idea what to say.
I like your coat!
She laughed, shook her head and walked away.
At a safe distance they’d written every day then twice a week then a dashed line here and there before Raif, absorbed in his mother’s needs and his ambitions for a life with Helen, didn’t notice that their correspondence had petered out. Now here she is, in his city, expecting to meet. He offers dinner, even though it might suggest more than he intends, because to encounter her in daylight would be too much. They’d met in a dim bar and walked through streets that were more or less unlit. His fantasies, in which she joins him in the hotel, have been just as softly lit.
Now he’s sitting opposite her in a restaurant and he’s not sure why. He orders a salad and a small glass of wine and Ava, after conveying her disappointment, follows suit. They talk about their institutions and the funding of the humanities until Ava reminds him that she has a story to tell. She emanates the same delicious combination of calm and erotic force that he remembers but he feels exposed. Why did he tell her his most private thoughts? We walk away from such conversations presuming that our secrets will remain where we left them – in a dark bar we’ll never return to. We don’t think of the person we confided in carrying our secrets home, let alone bringing them back to us later. Ava doesn’t hesitate to do exactly this.
I looked into what you told me. About your wife.
My wife?
Your wife. Her father’s defection. It wasn’t—
Something has started to move and he’s not ready.
You did what?
You said you wanted to know but you couldn’t bring yourself to do anything about it. I thought that as a friend—
A friend?
Raif wishes this woman had confined herself to his fantasies, naked under her silver coat in the dim hotel room.
I don’t understand, Ava says. I made an enquiry. I was given some information. I thought it would help you.
He wants at least to be polite.
It would. I’m sorry if you feel—
The English apology.
I want to apologise for that too, but it would mean saying sorry again.
The English joke.
I’m not—
English? Yes you are. So English.
Their food arrives and they sit and look at it. Raif makes a decision.
I think I want to know. Please. I really do. I want to know.
Ava picks up her knife and fork and puts them down again.
Her father was a diplomat and when she was a teenager he was posted to New York and he got permission for one of his children to visit him.
So it’s true.
It’s not true that he defected. That is someone else’s story.
But she stayed in America. That must be true.
It is. She ran away.
Raif’s mind moves towards the facts, for they are facts now. Liis went to America and she ran away.
She must have been desperate, he says, and so brave.
I expect so.
Didn’t her father try to find her?
Ava pauses. She’s looking at him now.
He was sent home. He never recovered. He killed himself.
The ice breaks. Raif has been plunged into deep cold water by this person who … who is she?
Who are you to bring me this?
I thought I was a friend.
Raif speaks very quietly.
We barely know each other. That’s why I told you my wife’s story and my private doubts. Because you are nothing to do with my life. Only you seem to know more about my life than I do. Haven’t you got a life of your own?
This is a voice he uses when someone crosses a line he’s depending on. Like Helen at the party when he wasn’t ready to admit who she was. I’d like another glass of wine. Then get one.
Ava flinches and then laughs. Another thought occurs to him.
Or did you think it would make an interesting piece of research?
She takes her time pouring a glass of water.
It is part of the story of my country. It also happens to be part of the story of your marriage.
I didn’t know!
So I have given this to you.
I hadn’t said I wanted you to go looking for it.
They drink in silence.
Do you remember, she says in her old warm voice, how you were when you came into that bar? You were full of your loss. It was your only subject. I felt sorry for you but you were quite boring.
You walked me back to my hotel.
You are a handsome man.
You sent messages every day.
Not for long.
She eats her salad. Raif stares at the dark window behind her. It occurs to him that now it would be better to know as much as he can. He remembers the conversation he had with Liis’s sister.
Did the family blame her? he asks.
How would I know?
I think they did. How did she manage to stay in America?
Ava pushes her plate away. She looks hurried or bored, he can’t tell.
Who knows, she says and picks up her bag. I’m sorry that the story has turned out to be so sad.
Did you not think you should have asked me before—
You said you wanted to know. And why do you think of it as your story? Which part of it is about you? She wasn’t only your wife.
He pays the bill. She does not thank him as she leaves.
Raif isn’t ready to think about what she has told him. He spends the rest of the afternoon sitting in his office and the evening in a pub
he dislikes and then makes his way home as slowly as possible. He kisses Helen, goes into the bedroom, shuts the door and gets out the box of Liis’s papers. Among them is an old address book. He knows what he’s looking for as soon as he sees it – an American number under a name he never heard her mention, Erik. He wants to call it but what will he say?
Forgive this intrusion, he rehearses out loud … You don’t know me but … I’m looking for Erik … My wife was a friend of Erik’s. I have some news for him …
He calls the number but the line is dead.
the black place
Helen has lived with someone before. They split up when she was thirty and looking back she’s amazed at how gentle their ending had been. She’d accepted his proposal on her birthday and then, in a panic, slept with his cousin and told him immediately. There were some weeks of confusion and pain, and at the time it felt like the most acute emergency of her life, but now she marvels at how gently they dealt with the matter, how little was asked or said.
It was the first great pain for either of them. They hadn’t yet opened the door behind strong feeling that lets us through to the black place where we take up weapons, however ancient or redundant. You have to smash your way out of the black place and will do so with whatever comes to hand.
*
Raif has been trying to let Helen know that he’s there now beside her. For a week or two she’s filled with joy and then she starts to think that this is not a beginning (so long deferred) but perhaps all there will be. How little she’s come to expect.
She looks across the room and sees a man in grief as usual. He has said he’s moved on, drawn a line, reconciled himself and is ready. If he really believes that, why does he keep saying it? And why does he look the same? Now and then she catches sight of the person he says he now is – alive, awake, feeling – but none of this is flowing towards her. She is not why.
As she waits for him to come back from the bedroom and explain what he’s doing and where he’s been, she gives up her generosity and patience. He is not who she thought he was and neither is she. As she steps through the door into the black place, she doesn’t know which of them she wants to hurt most: Raif for his failure to love her or herself for insisting that he might. In the black place she sees that he stands behind his wife’s death because of what he can then hide. With great sadness, she picks up her weapons.
In the City of Love's Sleep Page 17
