My route took me through the fringes of a highrise slum, the Porsche as strange as a spaceship in this land of the dog turd and the abandoned mattress. I turned gratefully back towards the bright and busy hive of the university, along Westborne Road, under the tree shadows, past the big old houses. And there, quite by chance, was Marnie, walking and talking between two men.
I slowed the Porsche to a smooth walking pace and buttoned the window down.
“Fancy a lift, Marnie?”
“Okay,” she said, without an ounce of hesitation. I unclicked the door and she slipped elegantly into the bucket seat. I exchanged a look with the two scruff postgrads she’d been walking with. Sorry, lads.
We zoomed off.
“I’ve just been driving around this morning,” I said. “I’d forgotten how good the Porsche was.”
She laughed. “How can you forget a thing like this? It takes half your salary.”
“You like it?”
“Of course I do. It’s just a car, but it’s a nice car. Why do you have to keep asking people these things? It’s like you don’t believe them yourself.”
I shook my head, shrugged. I touched the brake and the car rooted itself to the line of a junction.
“Last night, whenever it was,” she said. “I don’t blame you for being angry when I was late. It’s just that everything gets so big with you and me. When you’re sweet, Dan, everything’s fine, but we always seem to be looking for ways to hurt each other.”
“I’ve been trying to think what to say,” I said. “Really, Marnie … I’m sorry, too.” Sincerity was always easier when you were driving.
I flashed my pass at the security guard at the east gate. I parked in my usual place by the arts faculty.
She slammed the passenger door.
“Careful,” I said.
“Careful’s my middle name.”
“Come round tonight,” I said to her across the Porsche’s roof. “It doesn’t matter what time. And we’ll sleep together and when we wake up on Saturday, whenever, we’ll go somewhere in this car. A day out, you and me.”
She smiled, her perfect face reflected in the perfect, glossy black. “That sounds nice.”
Deeply in love, I watched her walk away. She gave me a backwards wave over her shoulder. My Marnie, my one and only.
Because I hadn’t stipulated early, the doorbell rang just after six. Marnie stood framed in the light from the hall against the winter black, wearing a tartan shawl and a waxed cotton jacket, carrying her overnight bag.
“Let me help you with that,” I said, ever the kindly host.
I dumped her bag by the telephone in the hall and swung the door shut with my foot. Helping her off with her jacket, my hands strayed from her shoulders, spoilt for choice between the curves of her breasts and her lovely behind. She turned and pushed herself against me. Our mouths locked, greedily exchanging breath and saliva. We were half undressed by the time we managed to get up the stairs. Marnie bounced onto the bed, sitting up to undo the remaining buttons of her blouse.
“No,” I said, struggling to take off my watch and socks at the same time. “I’ll do that. I’ll do everything.”
We went for a meal later at the nearby Indian restaurant. It was a regular place of ours. The waiters gave us the best table, away from the toilets and the door to the street. I’d managed to get some cash by writing a cheque at the bank, but my recollection of prices was still vague, and even though Marnie always insisted on paying her share, I wasn’t sure whether I’d have enough for the meal and to see us through the weekend. When we sat down, I asked Marnie if they’d accept Visa.
“We always pay that way here,” she said, pulling her chair in. “You’re very forgetful lately.”
“You’re too much of a distraction.”
“Let’s see now.” She reached across the pink tablecloth and took my hand. She was achingly beautiful in the candlelight. “You tell me who the Chancellor of the Exchequer is.”
I went cold. I didn’t have the faintest idea. Antony Barber? Too early. Dennis Healey? No, Labor. Then who?
Her golden-lit eyes saw through me for a moment.
I felt as though I wasn’t there.
“Time’s up,” she said, letting go of my hand.
The waiter came over with the menus. In the brief distraction, I remembered. But it was too late to say.
“I’m sorry,” I said, studying the long lists of kormas and tandoori dishes to avoid meeting her eyes. “I’ve been feeling a bit odd lately. You’ve obviously noticed. Maybe I should see a doctor.” I tried a laugh. “Or a psychiatrist.”
It was the only fragile moment in an otherwise perfect evening. We got merry on house red. I asked her about her name, just as I’d done all those years before, and she admitted that, yes, her mother really had got it from that Hitchcock movie. Not even a particularly good Hitchcock movie, she added, her eyes dropping towards the candlewax and poppadum crumbs. I took her hand and kissed her palm and held it tenderly against my cheek.
Underneath all the looks and all the laughter and all the friends she had, Marnie was vulnerable. There was no doubt about it. Sitting talking or not talking, simply gazing at her, I could also feel my own barriers slipping down. We were so different, so alike: disappointed with a world that had given us many of the things we didn’t want and held out on the few we really desired. Between the two of us there was something. Like looking in a mirror, it was both a separation and a sharing, a glassy edge between us on which we tried to balance our love. In later years, of course, I romanticized her, idealized her, but now, being with her again, sharing the thoughts and looks and words and silences, of that best kind that you can never recall afterwards, I lost any remaining doubts about our love being ordinary, or even a passing obsession. I loved her. This was, for once in my life, totally and completely real.
We walked home, hugging each other close against the cold, our frosty breath entwined in the streetlight.
The perfect evening was followed by a perfect night. Everything we did we did slowly, heavily blurred with love. We kissed each other through the edges of sleep. Once, deep in the night, she began to shiver, although it wasn’t from the cold. I held her tight until she was still, as I had done before.
“Help me, Dan,” she whispered from inside. “Love me.”
The dream flowed into the dreamy morning. Bringing coffee to our bed, I could hardly believe that it was this simple and natural to be in love. With the curtains open so we could see the trees and the sky, we sat close under the comforter and debated over a map where we might go. We settled on wherever the roads took us.
I rolled the Porsche proudly out of the garage through a romantic mist of exhaust. My lovely car; it seemed right that it should share our lovely day. I was grinning stupidly, a kid at Christmas. I felt like laughing at the thought of how hard I’d tried to find the words when I’d first returned to Marnie, when all that mattered really was being like this. Together.
I even trusted her to drive for a while, once we were safely out on the country roads. She grated the gears a couple of times, but I managed to keep quiet: no damage was done, and she understood the need to be delicately careful. We swapped back over. It was a wonderful feeling to be driving in this car, with a beautiful woman beside me and nothing but ourselves to fill the day, and the bare trees reaching over the roads, their clawed reflections sweeping the wide hood. We stopped at a country pub and sat in old leather chairs beneath the beams and in the firelight, sipping salty, hoppy beer. They were already playing Christmas tunes on the jukebox, and we talked about where we would go together then. Somewhere with mountains and snow.
Marnie peeled the print off a beer mat and sketched a picture of me with a biro. When she handed it over, I saw that it was as good as it had always been, a little too accurate for me to appreciate, maybe; a few quick and easy strokes that said things that those old, cold photographs never had. The only difference now was that the card of the mat was softly white aga
in, instead of the yellowed memento I was more used to. Marnie’s work was always at its best when she wasn’t concentrating or trying. She wasn’t really an artist. She had talent, but she was too busy coping with life to turn it into much. She would never have become any kind of artist or designer.
On our way out through the deserted benches of the pub garden, Marnie sat down on the kiddies’ wooden swing, not caring about the lichen and moss. She tilted her legs and I pushed her back and forth. The publican came out to bring a barrel up from the cellar. I expected him to tell us to get the hell off, but he just looked and smiled oddly at us, like a man who realises he’s lost something.
As we drove on, Marnie told me about a day when she was a child, when it was summer and her father was still alive. He’d pushed her on a creaky swing into the hot sky. He had a tweed jacket that smelt of pipe tobacco and that itched when he hugged her. There were shimmering trees and a lake and a big house of white stone.
“I wish I could find out where that place was,” she said. “Just in the past, I guess.”
I parked the Porsche under the trees in a country lane. A quiet place. A pretty, nowhere place. The sky was thickly grey. Everything was shadowed and soft, like a room with the curtains drawn. We walked on between the dark hedgerows.
A sign pointed across the fields towards a landmark hill. We followed the track, keeping to the grassy sides to avoid the worst of the mud. A flock of swans flew silently over. Their whiteness seemed to make them ghostly creatures from another world.
Standing at the grassy top of the hill, the whole of a county was spread around us. The grey of the city to the north. Villages and towns. Trees and fields dark with winter. A toy van travelling down a toy road. A big reservoir: tarnished silver, then suddenly bright in the ripples from a breeze that soon touched our faces with cold.
“We haven’t done anything today,” I said.
“That’s what’s been so good.” Marnie hugged me. I could feel the soft pressure of her breasts. “I’d like to have another day like this, please.”
“I’d like to have another day like this, please.”
I couldn’t bring myself to reply.
She let go. “What is it, Dan?”
I shrugged. “Just … talking about the future.”
“You should know the future never comes.”
What was I supposed to do? Nothing had changed. This day. This hill. These words. Marnie. Me.
“What shall we do tonight?” I asked.
“What shall we do tonight?” I asked.
“I’ll have to go back to my flat.”
“I’ll have to go back to my flat.”
I nodded, trying very hard to picture her in that cold and empty room, with the half-finished paintings, the drooping rubber plant in the corner, the owl wind-chime silent at the window.
“I promised to see some people,” she said. “A sort of party. Come along with me. It’ll be fun.”
“It doesn’t matter what I say, does it?”
“Don’t be like that. Please.”
We walked back to the Porsche in our own puzzled and separate silences. It was waiting under the trees, looking like something out of a calendar or a magazine. Marnie climbed inside and lit a cigarette, exhaling a cloud against the dashboard and windscreen.
“Couldn’t you have done that when you were outside?” I said thickly.
She took another drag. “It’s too cold out there, Dan. It’ll go when we get moving.…” She gave me a pitying look. Poor Daniel, the look said, to be bothered by such an absurd little thing. In truth, I wasn’t bothered, as I had been before. But it was too late to change things.
Marnie shivered. “Can’t we just get going? I’m cold. I’ve been cold all day.”
Cold all day.
Cold all day.
I gripped the steering wheel hard. “I thought we’d been happy. I thought today was special … So special you won’t even bloody well stay with me tonight!”
“It has been special,” she said. She opened the ashtray on the dash between us and maneuvered her cigarette towards it. But the ash fell on the black carpet beside the gearbox. She gave it a careless brush, as though that was enough. “I’ve just been a bit … chilly. You know how I am.”
The inside of the car was thick with smoke. I clicked the ignition key on a turn and pressed the master button that brought both of the windows down. “Why the hell do you have to smoke in here?” I said over the gentle buzz of the window motors. “Especially when we’re trying to talk?”
She laughed, or attempted to. I think she was already starting to cry. “You call this talking? All that bothers you is me smoking in this precious bloody car of yours. Marnie messing up your pretty images of the way everything should be. Marnie smoking. Marnie drinking. Marnie actually sometimes wanting to be with people other than you. When all you want is some woman to sit by you in this bloody, bloody car! It’s that simple, isn’t it?”
I gripped the steering wheel. I said nothing. There was no point.
“Why don’t you just fuck off,” she said childishly, childishly stubbing the cigarette out on my carpet, getting out of the Porsche, childishly slamming the door.
I got out on my side. She was standing there beneath the big oak tree, with the placid winter countryside all around us, as though none of this was happening.
“If you could see yourself,” I said. “How stupid this is.”
“Of course it’s stupid! We’re having a stupid argument. Or perhaps you hadn’t noticed?”
“Why?” I asked reasonably.
“Everything has to be so personal with you,” she said, breathing in and out in shudders, her face puffed with ugly tears. “That bloody car of yours! This was a lovely day until you ruined it.”
“I want you to respect me … respect my property.”
“Your property!” Now she was yelling. The sound was unnatural, unwomanly. I’d never seen her this angry before.
I’d never seen her this angry before.
“Just listen.…”
I stepped towards her. She pushed me away and stumbled over to the car.
“You deserve this—” she was shouting through the thickness of her tears. “—You really do. You bastard! Your property! You do deserve this. I love you, you bastard. I’m not. Your property. Fuck you. I hope you never—”
I watched her fumble open the driver’s door. She started the Porsche with the accelerator floored and the gears in reverse. The engine howled, and the car gave a juddering leap backwards into a tree. The bumper crunched, shivering leaves and scraps of bark through swirls of exhaust. Marnie knocked the wiper stalk as she screeched into first. The blades flicked to and fro. Then she pulled away, the fat tyres kicking up a shower of mud and leafmold; a rich, incongruous scent amid the drifting reek of the petrol.
The engine roar faded into silence. I looked at my watch; almost four o’clock. I began to walk back along the road towards the nearest village. I knew the way: right at the crossroads and straight ahead after that. I was even able to save myself a mile’s pointless detour down a badly signed road that petered out to a farm track, but it was still deep twilight, and my shoes were pinching badly by the time I reached the village green and used the phonebox to call for a cab. I waited shivering outside. There were trees and chimneys and a church spire in silhouette against a grainy sky, warmly lit leaded windows in the houses, two ducks circling in the dim pond. The whole scene was heavy with nostalgia for times much earlier than these, the wholesome wood-scented, apple-scented, sunset-coloured days that had never been.
The cab came quickly. Questing headlights swung towards me across the crumbling churchyard wall. It was a Japanese car, I think, not the sort of car that had a real name that anyone remembers. A functional box on wheels. I asked the driver to take me to the nearest town; I didn’t bother to explain. I knew that he would perform his role well enough in silence, just as he had done before.
The shops were shut, and the main car
park around the big war memorial where he dropped me off was almost empty. No use offering Visa. I paid the fare without a tip. I was left with exactly forty-nine pence in my pockets. A cold wind was starting. A few cans rattled and chimed across the streetlit tarmac.
The police station was on a side road at the back of Woolworth’s. An old man backing out through the doors with his dog gave me a weary, sharing smile. I told the duty constable at the counter that an acquaintance had driven my car away without permission. I didn’t think they were insured. I told him the car was a Porsche. Unimpressed, he nodded towards the empty plastic benches by the doors and told me to wait.
I sat down. Like the few other police stations I’ve been inside, this one was absurdly quiet, as though it had been waiting for greying, paint-peeling years for something to happen. Something to make up for all the drunks, and all the people like me. I studied the curling posters on the notice board opposite. Oddly, I couldn’t remember any of them. I wondered vaguely, irrationally, if that was somehow a sign that things would end up differently.
Two sergeants came out from a room at the back. They flipped up the side of the counter. Before they spoke, I knew from their faces that it had happened. I wondered if this was the time to end it, but part of me wanted to see it again. To be certain.
They drove me to the reservoir. There was a noisy crane there already, and floodlights probing thick yellow shafts into the water. Men in uniforms peered down from the roadside. People were gathering around the fringes of the darkness to watch. One of the sergeants leaned over to the back seat before we stepped out of the car and asked me if I thought it was an accident; just the sort of casual question they try on you before you’ve had time to put your guard up.
“I used to think so,” I said, not caring what they made of it. “But now I don’t know. I’m not sure.”
The Porsche looked like a big, black crab as it broke the surface. It rose into the harsh light, water sluicing out of it in glittering curves. People oohed and aahed. Chains tensed and screamed with the car’s weight. The air filled with the smell of green mud, like a bad beach at low tide. The crane paused for a moment, a big insect hesitating with its prey, then swung the car down onto the road. The suspension broke with twig-like snaps. The car was still wet and heavy, dark pools sliding across the verge and down the bank, running eagerly back into the reservoir. Sleepwalking figures broke the door open, and there was a thick rush of mud before they lifted Marnie out. No one hurried. I didn’t envy the police their job.
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 32
