Who was she? For years, the woman David described: first a goddess, then mysteriously layered and then a series of walls. Only now these ideas are loosening. David had drawn a circle too. Or he hadn’t. Maybe Adam hadn’t either. Maybe that’s what she does every time: draws a circle and then convinces herself that she can’t step out of it. Perhaps it’s about to happen again. But this man isn’t like the others. He’s a number of quieter things, not energetic or shining but impressive in ways that she, for some reason, is able to bring out.
The shape love takes depends on what we need it for. It might be to simplify a landscape or to furnish an emptiness, to give our lives more detail or less. For Iris it’s the drawing of a circle. For Raif it’s the forming of a surface. Whatever it is, we do it ourselves and each time believe it different and the gift of the one we now love.
a strengthening
When they meet again they hesitate once more. They’re having lunch on a Saturday while the girls are with friends. Iris is twenty minutes late.
I’ve got two hours, she says as she sits down. More like an hour and a half.
Raif has already ordered a bottle of wine but Iris says no, she isn’t drinking.
Is everything alright?
Yes. No. I had an argument with Lou just before I came out.
What about?
She wants to get her ears pierced.
Iris has shown him pictures of the girls. He can’t remember their ages but would have said they were about fourteen and sixteen.
And you think she’s too young?
Her sister doesn’t want to get hers done.
So if Katie—
Kate.
Sorry. If Kate wanted to do it as well, you’d be more convinced?
One with pierced ears and the other not?
I don’t understand what the issue is.
You think I should let them?
That’s up to you.
Iris catches up with herself.
It’s me, isn’t it? I find the idea of them choosing not to look like one another really upsetting.
You do?
Absorbed by this insight, Iris talks about the girls for the rest of lunch – how Lou has started to wait till Kate’s dressed and then wears something as different as possible. How they’ve rearranged their room so that they can’t see each other when in bed. How often now she finds one of them alone. Raif tries to be interested but he doesn’t understand. They’re sisters, that’s all. They’re growing up.
Iris looks at her watch.
Christ, it’s already three. I have to go. Thank you, it’s been lovely and you’ve been … Thank you. You really helped.
For Raif this meeting has fallen flat. Iris was late and talked about her children and he hadn’t known what to say. But apparently he has helped her and when he reminds himself of this, he feels proud and useful. And with this comes a strengthening of his need for her.
the glamour of the object
The line drawn between Iris and Raif holds across the city as they move through their separate days. Anchored in one another, they are more sure of themselves. People notice them. Students who find themselves alone with Raif in his office stutter and blush. A young man strikes up a conversation with Iris in the museum and asks for her number. She offers him her card and he laughs – not that number. More than once she looks up – in a meeting, on a train – to find someone looking at her with the blank gaze that is the body saying yes.
She and Raif speak each night but it is in their messages, several a day, that they are building something. They’re both quick to pick up what might become emblematic. He asks which is her favourite object in the collections and she sends him a picture of a tiny bronze skeleton. It immediately takes up its place alongside the cloud mirror, the merman, her falling down the steps, the walk across the bridge, the dance in the corridor in what is not yet a life but already a story.
Iris is in no hurry to make him a full part of her life. Something reminds her of the early days with Adam in the graveyard and it’s true that they come and go from their relationship as if it were a walled garden. That wasn’t real, she thinks. This isn’t real. But Raif has his own hesitations and so is untroubled by hers. They set themselves at an equal distance. They limit what they share and continue to shine.
Their meetings depend upon the girls, David, and Raif’s mother. One night Iris suggests to Raif that they go back to his flat but he didn’t wash up or make the bed before leaving so he finds a way to say no. They stick to meeting in the centre of the city, where so much is designed to carry love along.
Iris continues to study herself. She thinks she’s fading just as she has been resensitised. She’s besotted with colour, scent, texture and taste. The sky, the river, the objects in her hands, move her. For Raif, this new love is a form of momentum. He takes small steps – talking to his doctor about cutting down his medication, painting one wall of the flat bright white – and thinks of each as decisive.
a skeleton
We hold onto the stuff of the body, invest it with magic and use it to cure or kill. The museum owns hundreds of such instruments and amulets, though they have been removed from view. There are the shrunken heads, of course, but also necklaces of bones painted in red ochre, mourning ornaments of hair wrapped in clay, a wooden doll with human hair that a girl carried on her back to show that she was ready for marriage.
Sometimes the human and animal have been merged in a doubling of strength: the skull of a woman covered in the skin of an antelope, ceremonial shoes made of feathers compacted with human hair and blood, a jawbone tip to an iron spear with a rhinoceros-horn handle.
There is a tooth used to ward off toothache and a tooth said to be the tooth of a king, a glass jar of human dust, a square of skin from the neck of a man hanged for forgery that shows the mark of the rope, excised tattoos, dried brains and dissected blood vessels, freeze-dried plasma, inscribed skulls, drilled skulls, bones made into bowls and flutes. If only our bodies felt this potent and adaptable when we were alive.
Nothing makes us feel more alive than being reminded of our death. This bronze skeleton, a little over four inches high, is 2,500 years old yet her purpose is to remind us of how little time we have. She is a memento mori handed out at Roman feasts. Carefully constructed, with articulated limbs, she has been rearranged. Her left arm is missing because it’s been used to replace her right leg. This makes her appear more human than less so. She reminds us not only of our ending but the extent to which we rearrange ourselves in order to persist.
a provocation
Raif has to cancel seeing Iris yet again because his mother rings at four a.m. to ask why he hasn’t arrived. Lunch is getting cold. He gets dressed and calls a cab, meaning to catch the first train, but then it strikes him that there’s little point. If she sets the house on fire the alarm will go off. If she’s in trouble the neighbours or carers will find out before he does. He can’t give up his job and go to live with her and she would not countenance leaving her home. So that’s that.
Only he wakes most nights from a dream of his mother falling, not in the bath or on the stairs but falling unendingly past him, just beyond reach. So he gets on the train and goes down that evening just to check.
The second time he cancels because Ashley has had her phone stolen by a boy on a motorbike who pulled her over as he grabbed it and she’s split open her chin. Raif takes her to hospital and by the time she’s discharged, both her sisters have arrived and all three come back to stay.
When they do manage to meet, for coffee, Raif tells Iris this story and shows her a picture of the triplets on his phone. As she takes it from his hand her thumb swipes the screen, pictures flick by and she’s looking at a woman wearing a silver coat.
That’s not them, he says, snatching his phone back.
Clearly. But she looks interesting.
She’s Estonian, like my wife.
I see.
She knew her … of her …
A qu
estion starts to form, though Iris will not ask it. There’s a version of herself that she has discarded: Iris of the Many Eyes – always seeing deception and secrets where, David insisted, there were none. She knows that these questions do no good and that she cannot stand to hear herself ask them. But Raif snatched back his phone.
She looks pleased, says Iris, that you wanted a photo.
Does she?
At least you met someone who knew your wife.
He wants so much not to lie.
She told me things about Liis’s childhood, her family, that Liis never did.
It is Iris who has the strongest sense of what’s at stake. She can either push Raif into a smaller and smaller corner or she can trust that whoever this woman is, she’s not important now. If she is, Iris will find out soon enough.
Don’t tell me her name, she says, and takes his hand so as to change the subject.
Raif raises her hand to his mouth and kisses it. But he can see that for Iris, Ava remains a provocation. Why didn’t he just explain?
I’m afraid I’ll have to go in a minute, he says.
(Perhaps this too is a lie? Iris wants so much not to have thought this.)
They sit there in silence, two small middle-aged people holding hands in a busy cafe at eleven o’clock on a Friday morning. It would be touching were it not for the fact that they seem unable to move.
fucking
The river pulls back from its banks in strong tides that churn its bed. There are places along its winding length where what’s drawn from the mud lingers. A million fragments of ordinary life – clay pipes, beer bottles, buttons and soup bowls – are cast up. They’ve been in the river for hundreds of years, some thousands, but unless you take them now, they will return to the flow and be carried out to the river mouth and you will never see them again.
*
Iris wakes early. There is a message from Raif sent at four a.m.: I should have been clearer. I can explain, and another at six: Call me when you wake up, but she doesn’t. It’s a late-summer morning without plans or exigencies. The girls are away for a week with their grandparents and although the house is full of things that need doing, she decides to go for a walk. She sets out north through the park and turns east along the river. Maps suggest that you can follow a single path along the riverside. It’s something of which the city is proud. But the reality, as Iris finds, is that developments, sold on their views, block the path with overdesigned fences and gates. It is not possible to follow the water’s edge without being met by these hostilities.
Iris walks fast, as if she’s trying to catch up with something. She’s impressed by how much progress she makes despite the detours she follows into back alleys and car parks. But where is she going? When she left her house she was agitated by the woman’s photo and Raif’s unstraightforward response. By the time she reaches the river she’s scared. There are things she has felt that she never wants to feel again.
Maybe her reaction has been out of all proportion to his small faltering lie. But they’ve established the start of something and she’d anticipated a calm while they gently found their feet. Now one uncertainty is giving way to another. This thing with Raif was worth nothing if it dragged all this behind it.
She climbs the steps onto the bridge that will lead her to Raif, and the sharp pain she’s been trying to walk away from shifts its emphasis from fear to feeling. I want this. It will already hurt me to lose it. She makes her way between the new towers and the old, looking and not looking for where Raif lives. She has his address memorised and pinpointed on the map on her phone but when she sees the corner of his street she doesn’t hesitate to walk straight past it.
*
Raif has been berating himself. The tension that sprang up in the cafe was familiar: whether to say something or not. After all, he’d spent all that time choosing what to show of himself to Helen and trying to understand the rules when with Liis. Until now he has shown Iris whatever arose. He could have explained that taking Ava’s photo was just a way of being polite. This wouldn’t be entirely true but it is what he believes now.
He sent his messages at four and at six, and he waited. By ten, the possibility that he’s lost her stabs at his heart. He should have called her but he’s become so cautious. The steps he has been able to take have been so small. He wants to go straight round to see her, to turn up on her doorstep as a demonstration of who he really is, but remembers that Rosa is back and they’ve arranged to have a cup of coffee.
Iris is crossing the bridge to the north just as Raif gets on a bus heading west. They’ll never meet each other like this. But they’ve each glimpsed the loss of the other and it has spurred them on.
*
Rosa and Raif promised to write while she was away but neither got round to it. She’s back now and when she walks into the cafe he’s incredibly pleased to see her. He needs to talk. Their conversation moves from the islands Rosa was visiting to his mother’s illness, the lack of students, the fee increases and the cuts, but this is not what he needs to talk about. Only he can’t bring himself to raise the subject. Eventually she does.
Are you still with the girlfriend you never told me about?
No.
But you look happy. Is there someone new?
Her name’s Iris.
Rosa sits back. She’s looking incredibly pleased with herself.
I think I know who she is.
Did someone tell you?
No, I saw you with her.
When?
At the museum last summer. The small woman in the big dress. You walked in at the same time, side by side, as if you were together. You couldn’t stop looking at her. And she was looking too. In the end you just made your way towards each other.
We had a conversation. That was all.
Yes, but I watched you talking.
That’s amazing, he says.
Rosa has no particular insight. Anyone could have seen what she did – two people saying yes. But for Raif it’s as if something has been tested and proved.
*
Halfway home, Iris gets a message from Raif suggesting that he come over that evening. He turns up with food, flowers and wine. She lights candles even though it won’t get dark for at least an hour. They sit down opposite each other at the laden table but barely eat and cannot think what to say.
My friend Rosa, my colleague, she’s been away. We had coffee this morning.
Is this the point where we tell each other about our day?
Of course not. It’s just she said something about us. About when we met that night at the museum. She saw us together and she knew.
Knew what?
That something would happen. That we would be this.
His heart has made its declaration.
Iris takes some time to decide on her words.
I’d rather we said it for ourselves than waited to be told.
She sees his disappointment and realises he thought he was passing on a blessing.
But yes, she says. We are this.
She gets up and goes to the open door, where she lights a cigarette, turning away from Raif so he can’t see that her hands are shaking. There is something in her movement that is so wonderfully familiar. If he thinks hard enough he might remember that when they walked through the doorway in the museum they stopped simultaneously to scan the room and he turned towards her just as she caught sight of someone else and turned away – just as she had when they’d finally spoken and again as they lay in bed that Sunday afternoon.
Iris is willing him to come towards her, to touch her, and eventually he does. The tips of his fingers trace the back of her broad sunburnt shoulder and his mouth skims the nape of her neck where her hair has just been cropped. He wants to fill his hands with her breasts, her belly, any part of her. He wants to hold her and be deep inside her and to make her feel everything he can. He is kissing her neck, her shoulders and her back as he starts to unzip her dress. She turns and from barely touching they pre
ss so hard against each other that they almost fall down. There will not be another game of sitting and looking, and they will not have sex on a bed of weeds and concrete or up against the warped kitchen counter. They go upstairs.
They don’t get undressed or wait for directions. They drop onto the bed and pull at each other’s clothes, undoing enough that he can find his way inside her. They aren’t looking at each other or thinking about anything. There is only one feeling and the force of it is such that they give up their memories and anxieties and are, at last, absolutely here.
Then they drink more wine, doze and wake together to have a rambling conversation in the dark in which they tell pure truths. Around midday they shower and get dressed (separately, demurely) but halfway down the stairs Raif touches Iris on the waist and they’re back in the bedroom. They show each other what they want. Everything’s new.
They spend the next five nights together, repeating and repeating themselves. Nothing lessens. On the third night, Iris has the dream she had as a child, about being made to see nothing, and she cries out. Raif, without waking, reaches a hand to cover her eyes. This is one of the most important things to happen to Iris and Raif and they sleep through it.
happiness
Here we are – so deep within ourselves that we feel nothing move. This is where love sleeps. We think it’s something we build when it’s waiting for the space we make.
When David sees Iris, whose name dissolves on his tongue, he feels his body become space and his surfaces grow strong. He has such a sense of capacity! He met a girl on a train and discovered that sitting down beside her made her feel alright. And now he can’t tell people who she is. They see a woman in her late forties who has learnt to guard herself. He sees a creator of space and a builder of edges.
In the City of Love's Sleep Page 21
