Thing of the Moment

by Bruno Noble

  ‘So what did you think, Sharon?’

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  I had to struggle to rid myself of the notion that they were mocking me for my insecurities and my promiscuity, things, I had to repeat to myself, they knew little about. As soon as I had regained my composure and as soon as I considered it polite to do so, I left.

  *

  The black and white film shook me for days, for weeks; it leached my world of colour, I couldn’t shake off the pall of ill feeling it left over me. The film and Mie’s meanness to David. It’s what I was thinking of as I rested in between dances one night, when Gaia asked me if I was all right.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she insisted.

  ‘My heart’s not in it,’ I said.

  She put her hand on my shoulder. ‘Of course not, darling,’ she said. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Why of course not?’

  ‘It’s all a game to you,’ she said wistfully, her arm around my shoulder. ‘You have another life. This,’ she said in a gesture that embraced London’s West End, ‘is just a distraction, a bit of fun, I know.’

  This life: the once exciting but now worn, jaded and yet still cosy dressing room; the once young and fresh but now tired, clammy bodies of a kind and affectionate sorority of fellow strippers; the admiring and generous customers; the grabbing and mean customers; the loving aunt now in a sheepishly confessed relationship with the avuncular, sleazy Pierre.

  The other life: the day job, now routine but challenged by changing faces, with only Jonathan remaining of the UK team, the others having been headhunted and replaced by younger, less experienced and colourful, more serious and self-important graduates; the slow dissolution of my secretarial college friendships, the fading remains of which provided Gavina and me with the pretext to pursue increasingly unsatisfactory one-night stands from London’s nightclubs’ poor pickings; the vestiges of a family: Dziadek and Babcia had died, my grandfather barely outliving my grandmother, dying from a broken heart, had said Dad, who, along with the rest of my family I hardly ever saw any more.

  Gaia said, ‘Come home with me. A walk will do you good. We’ll stop for breakfast in Smithfield Market, we can watch the sun come up and then you can crash at my place.’

  We walked east for half an hour, along Long Acre, Chancery Lane and Holborn, on pavements wet with dew and deserted save for the odd street sweeper, office cleaner and drunk. We entered and exited the streetlamps’ pools of light in repetition, our shadows racing ahead of us on each occasion to the next, leaving me with the illusion that we were making no progress.

  ‘So, what’s the matter?’ Gaia repeated.

  What was the matter? My double life was exhausting me, my two half-lives catching up on me, each shining a light on the emptiness of the other. Not twice as fulfilled but half so, if that, and twice as tired. The repetitive filling of a bottomless pit with the daily grit of life’s experience, the one-night stands, the near-naked provocative dances and the trading slips correctly completed and delivered. Tension at home, with Aunt Wanda spending nearly all her time with Pierre, aware of and unhappy with what she knew I considered to be the ludicrousness of her having shacked up with a dirty old man. I would bake cakes and biscuits for her that would remain untouched. Tension at the club with Wanda, now the manager too, having taken the business by the scruff of the neck. She became more brutally mercantile, more of a driven business director and less of an agony aunt to the girls; she focused increasingly on financial success at all costs, perhaps in a rational commercial response to the economic downturn, or perhaps already aware that it wouldn’t be long before Pierre traded her in, and wishing to make a demonstrable improvement to the club’s bottom line so that he might think hard about the nature of the figures he preferred over others.

  ‘Something’s got to give,’ said Gaia.

  ‘Yes. Probably. But what?’

  ‘You’re too nice a person to be unhappy,’ she said.

  Mid-step, I touched Gaia’s shoulder with my head in appreciation of her modest tribute. ‘I’m not unhappy so much as not happy.’

  ‘You’re too nice a person not to be happy,’ she said.

  We strode London’s pavements shoulder to shoulder, occasionally parting company momentarily – for lampposts, street signs and stacks of full black bin-liners that had been piled high by shopkeepers where London’s litter bins had stood before being removed in response to the IRA bombings – and converging again once an obstacle had been circumvented in a reflection of life’s encounters, separations and reunions.

  ‘Something’s gotta give,’ she sang with a deep voice and a sudden swagger.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you want? What do you want? Out. Of. Life?’ She assumed a tone of mock interrogation.

  ‘I don’t know. Yes, I do know. I just haven’t gone about it the right way,’ I admitted. ‘Actually, it’s not all I thought it would be. It’s not enough.’

  ‘I see,’ she said gravely. She wrinkled her brow a moment and added, ‘You could stop working in the bank.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Or you could stop working at the club.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Or you could reduce your working hours at the club. One night instead of two.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would the bank allow you to work part-time?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s out of the question then. You could consider taking a customer home, from time to time,’ she said slyly, looking at me out of the corner of her eyes.

  ‘No!’

  ‘They’re all dying for you, you know. I know they are. Now that you’ve learnt to dance properly!’ She knocked me off balance a little with a nudge of her elbow. ‘They’re no different from the losers you tell me about that you and your friends pick up on your nights out. Correction. They are. They’re richer. And you could be too. Stop a second.’

  We stood outside Ely Place, a gated cul-de-sac off Holborn Circus. I followed Gaia through an unlocked pedestrians’ gate next to a small quaint gatehouse, and down a short road of terraced Georgian mansions.

  ‘A terraced church!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Unusual, isn’t it? St Ethelreda’s.’ She beckoned. ‘Come on. It’s sometimes open at this time.’ She pushed on a door that led into a hallway. I followed her, nodding to a man with a broom who responded with a nod of his own and continued his sweeping, seemingly unperturbed by the arrival of two bleary-eyed women with smudged make-up and tousled hair in running shoes and skimpy tops and miniskirts under long coats. We turned right along a corridor, went up a flight of stairs and right again into the church. ‘It’s special, isn’t it? So quiet. I love it here.’

  ‘How did you find this place?’ I couldn’t help but whisper, and looked around in wonder. The church was dark, its indiscernible stained-glass windows, in the gloom, as solid and non-translucent as its thick walls.

  Gaia chuckled and sat in a pew, sliding along it a space so I could join her. She exuded a familiarity with the place, a deep comfort that communicated a sense of ownership. I counted fourteen pews and five windows on either side of the aisle. Ten life-size indistinguishable statues on the walls in between the windows and in the two corners of the church facing me, either standing on indiscernible wall-fixed pedestals or with their backs fixed to the wall, presented us with the appearance of ghosts, of corpses hovering well above the floor, or of bodies hanging from the high arched roof.

  ‘Do you believe in God?’

  ‘Look.’ She pointed at the stained glass. ‘You’ll see when the sun rises. He’ll absolve you of all of your sins. He loves people like us.’

  ‘This is a Catholic church, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  My eyes adjusted to the lack of light. The whites of Gaia’s eyes were the brightest things I could discern. I felt warm in my coat. ‘It’s so different to our Catholic chu
rch. Ours is so much plainer. I thought they’d all be like that.’

  ‘How many churches have you been to then?’

  ‘Two, I think. Now. And our school chapel,’ I added as an afterthought. ‘If that counts.’

  ‘Only two! And you’re Catholic?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I asked you first.’

  ‘Well, my mother’s mother is a Catholic,’ I said, ‘and my mother’s father is a Jew who converted to being a Catholic. And my father’s mother was a Jew and my father’s father was a Catholic who converted to being a Jew.’

  ‘Is? Was?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, resting a hand on my arm briefly in condolence. ‘Confusing! What does that make your parents?’

  ‘My mother is Catholic and Dad thinks he’s Church of England. And as for me…’ My voice tailed off. I found it difficult to speak loudly and for long in this splendid place of hush. The symmetry of the church, of its nave, columns and windows contrasted with my internal disorder. The regularity and harmony of line and form, the church’s perfection of structure and geometry existed in aloof rebuke to my patchwork, limping self.

  ‘Yes, and as for you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I whispered, resting my head on her shoulder.

  ‘I knew it. Just a crazy mixed-up kid,’ she said softly, and stroked my cheek.

  ‘Yes. You know what used to really freak me out was Mass. When I was a child, when we were told we had to eat the body of Christ, I found it shocking. I was afraid that, having no idea who I was in the first place, if I ate someone else, I would become them! Was that stupid? Is that blasphemous?’

  Gaia considered that sombrely, continuing to stroke my cheek, seemingly quite unconsciously. ‘Hoc est enim corpus meum,’ she said seriously and then, by way of explanation, ‘It’s on one of the windows. You’ll see,’ stroking still, and immediately after, it seemed to me, she said, ‘Open your eyes!’, her voice swimming up from the depths of sleep to which I had sunk, her words popping like bubbles as I surfaced, reached in my confused state for elusive stepping stones and lifted my head from her shoulder.

  The sun had risen on Christus Rex, seated amid angels and Mary and Joseph in fiery, technicolour magnificence. The formerly opaque east window emanated the most warm and yet brilliant light, the Christ figure splendid, serene and commanding, the red-clothed and yellow-winged angels adoring and obeisant. Gaia and I clutched each other. It was a second of the richest, most rewarding theatre, appearing unexpectedly before the raised stage curtains of my painted eyelids.

  We sat a while, saying nothing, then rose and wandered the aisle before stopping at the west window upon which Christ, crucified, hung, hovering above an auburn- and chocolate-coloured temple on a crimson cross in robes of rose, magenta and pink lozenges, looking down on us in welcome and farewell.

  Gaia looked around her. We were alone in the church. ‘Would it ever occur to you to say,’ she whispered haltingly, ‘that Jesus committed, you know, suicide?’

  ‘What?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘In a way, in a sense,’ she added hurriedly. ‘I mean, he knew he was going to be killed and yet he did nothing to change that outcome – is not doing anything to prevent something from happening that different from actually doing it?’

  ‘He gave his life,’ I said. ‘He didn’t take his life.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said quickly.

  ‘He sacrificed himself, true,’ I added, thinking. ‘Maybe there’s not that much difference.’

  She squeezed my hand. ‘Come,’ she said, and we moved falteringly the way we had come, out of St Ethelreda’s and down the corridor and into the early morning’s bleaching light. Once at the gatehouse, I looked back, but the church, set in a recess amid its terraced neighbours, was hidden from view.

  We tottered downhill and uphill to a confusion of lamp-lit lorries and busying bodies set before a large Victorian structure, the far end of which was lost in steam and the early morning sky.

  ‘Not another church, Gaia?’

  Gaia laughed. ‘Not exactly! This is Smithfield Market! Are you hungry?’ Her cheeks bore the evidence of dried tears.

  ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘This way, through the Poultry Market.’ She took me by the hand as we barged through groups of men, some of them standing and smoking and talking in loud voices while others carted sides of beef and other animals, and others yet bought and sold all manner of cuts of meat. ‘What’s so funny?’ she asked, after I had laughed in turn.

  ‘It’s like work!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Work?’

  ‘The noise, the people, the shouting. The bartering. It’s like the club on a busy night, like the trading floor on a big data day!’

  We ducked and dived and rolled out of the way of tradesmen who sold with the good cheer of fairground workers and of shoppers who bought with the determination of businessmen intent on a good deal. I allowed myself to be guided by Gaia who strode the centre aisle between the meat stalls with confidence, linking her arm with mine.

  Chopped ox-tail, ox-feet, tripe, honeycomb, sweetbread, pluck, lamb head, chumps, shanks, back straps, fries, trotters, pork loin, pork trim and spare ribs were advertised on one board; topside, silverside, chuck tender, chuck roll, eye of round, rump tail, clod, feather blade, brisket, rolled brisket, sirloin, rump, rib eye, fillet and neck fillet on another.

  ‘Why’s it called the Poultry Market?’ I asked.

  Ears, cheeks, tongue, shoulder, hearts, liver, kidney, knuckle, flank, leg, shin, heel, boasted a precariously balanced blackboard.

  ‘This way,’ she said, pulling me by the arm, and no sooner were we out of the Poultry Market than we were down some stairs and not into a public lavatory, which had been my first thought as my eyes adjusted to the relative obscurity, but into a café or, on the evidence of the many pint glasses, a pub. We sat on coffee-and tea-stained upholstery at beer-stained paper napkin-covered tables among butchers and meat traders in bloody aprons and once-white coats, and ordered bacon sandwiches and tea. A layer of cigarette smoke created the illusion of a lower, false ceiling that a rheumatic ventilation unit strived in vain to raise. Gaia hunched her shoulders and screwed her eyes up in her endearing way of saying, What fun!

  ‘Hello, Gaia!’

  ‘Morning, Biffo!’

  ‘Disappointed to find that The Cock Tavern is a pub after all, Gaia?’

  ‘No, given that there’s at least one prick here, Jimmy.’

  ‘So, what’s the fresh meat you’ve brought with you, Gaia?’

  ‘Her name is Sharon.’

  ‘Come here, darling!’

  Again, the shrug, the squint and the smile that spoke in code of intimacy, friendship, confidences and shared experiences. I wanted to hug her for letting me in on my city’s little secrets, its churches, its markets and Victorian streets and said, as we wandered through the now quieter, closing West and East Markets to her flat, that in exchange I could show her its parks and green spaces.

  ‘How sweet,’ was all she said without enthusiasm, and then, as though in apology, finding my hand with hers, ‘Come, I’ll show you my place.’

  Mie

  I knew that I had treated David badly but was more sorry for the low standard of my behaviour than for the upset I had caused him. I held a book I was reading up to my face like a mirror and was confronted with the inescapable fact that I had expressed frustration towards David in order to hide from the true nature of my feelings for Sebastian.

  I had taken Sebastian to a meeting with a client he’d complained about. It had proved constructive: the client had come to a realisation of the issues Sebastian faced as a trader and Sebastian to a better understanding of the regulations the client had to operate within. Of course, what made sense for one company could make sense for another, so Sebastian and I embarked on a round trip of investor meetings in London and in Germany. We spent days together, in planes, in cars to and from airports and clients�
�� offices and on foot crossing London’s Square Mile and, in that time of journeying, pre-meeting preparation and post-meeting debriefs, I got to know him a little.

  Sebastian knew all about Japanese etiquette following his secondment to Tokyo.

  ‘So, you liked it?’

  ‘Tokyo? I loved it.’ We were walking to a late-afternoon engagement and had stopped at the junction of London Wall and Moorgate. ‘Yes. Look. Here, in London, we have to cross two roads, to cross twice – first we cross one road and then the other. In Tokyo, you cross a crossroads diagonally.’

  We crossed London Wall.

  ‘Is that the best thing you can find to say about Tokyo?’

  ‘What was there not to like?’

  ‘Would you have liked to have stayed there longer?’

  He pursed his lips and took me by the elbow to help me cross Moorgate in an action that surprised me by its familiarity. ‘If you’re asking me whether you’ve done the right thing by coming here, I think you have.’

  Freeing my arm from his hold and irritated by his assumption, I replied, ‘No, that’s not what I was asking you.’ Then I asked, in as a matter-of-fact a way as possible, ‘So, how come I haven’t heard you speak Japanese?’

  Sebastian swung his slim attaché case as he strode among the other pedestrians. ‘Ah! I was warned not to. “Sleeping” Japanese is what I was told I will have learnt, so I thought I’d keep my mouth quite closed so as not to give too much away.’ He was referring to the name given to the Japanese that gaijin learn from their Japanese mistresses who will, at times, by virtue of their sex or status or both, employ grammatical constructions that are different to those employed by businessmen. Consequently, when a gaijin uses them, they will betray where and from whom he has learnt his Japanese. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, trying to catch my eye as we parted to make way for people heading in our direction. ‘Have I embarrassed you?’