Exposure

by Talitha Stevenson

  But there had been times when the urgency was even greater: when she arched herself over him, her hand pressed against his chest to keep him still and he felt her tense every muscle one by one in a ritual of agonizing precision. It was like being children, playing a game of blinking, or eating doughnuts without licking the sugar off your lips—who would give in first to the body's desires? Slowly, slowly, she would build the longing in their nerve endings—and then, shaking and crying out, she would kick and slap it away.

  It had all been so wonderful—his designer lamps got knocked over, wine bottles rolled, pouring wild streams across the floor, and they shouted out all kinds of passionate nonsense without caring what it meant or who heard it through the wall. At last she would fall exhausted on to the pillow beside him, saying, "Hanks, baby,' in her baby voice.

  Why the baby voice? he wondered. It had always been slightly sinister, belonging to the realm of things he didn't understand about her, like her rages and her sudden fits of crying.

  One thing he knew with absolute certainty was that he would never again experience as much physical pleasure as he had with Arianne. She had a capacity for total sensual abandonment that he had not seen in any other girl he had slept with. He had never heard a girl cry like she could, either. She cried as voluptuously as she made love. He had felt as inadequate before her sadness as he did before her sensuality and had not known how to help when she bawled and rocked, hugging her knees.

  He had let her down time and again. At the end she had seemed to hate him most of all when she cried and he laid his stupid, inadequate hand on her back. She jolted it off, saying, 'Oh, just fuck off, Luke.' Once, in one of their last arguments, she had actually punched him in the face.

  Girls could really hit. Luke knew this because his sister had hit him once, too. Not just kids' play-fighting, but a genuine attack just a couple of years ago. Sophie had caught his cheek and his nose with a sweeping backhand after a row about who had lost the remote control and who, by extension, was the more spoilt and irresponsible. The impact made a comic-book thwaaack! and his nose started to bleed. He stared at his sister's shocked face, saying, 'What the .. . what the .. .' until she ran out of the room in tears.

  Luke thought: What if, fundamentally, women consider men an enemy and basically want to humiliate and destroy them?

  But—he loved girls! Were they getting back at men for making them do the vacuuming and the cooking for all those years? He felt on the verge of deep understanding and rubbed his head and his eyes. Then he thought fondly of Lucy, who said things like 'Oh, you are such a lovely man, aren't you, darling?' when she undid his shirt and stroked the hair on his chest. He thought of his mother and the way she had hugged him that morning in the kitchen, relying on him.

  No, it was just these crazy women who hated men. He wondered if his sister was good in bed like Arianne and decided immediately that she would be. This was a profoundly disturbing thought and he got out of the car quickly, slammed the door and locked it.

  He walked down towards the crowd of people on the seafront. The demonstration had grown. Sixty or seventy people stood along the marina, holding placards and shouting. Their physical anger seemed unreal to Luke. He had spent so many sleepless nights surfing the Internet that real life was like a complex website and he felt his index finger twitch for 'click here' when he opened a door or reached for something. The Internet, the TV and the weird moonlit reticence of his parents were many times removed from these loud voices and raised fists.

  'Out! Out!' they shouted.

  'Out! Out! Scream and shout! Dover residents, use your clout!'

  Luke read the placards as he got close enough to see.

  'Illegal Invasion!'

  'Swamp France Instead!'

  'Dover is not Asylum Alley.'

  It was one of the demonstrations his aunt Suzannah had mentioned seeing on the news—a mixture of local residents and nationalist groups campaigning against the influx of asylum-seekers. He had read about the latest in a series of government 'crackdowns', which had involved giving police man-sensor machines to help catch smugglers as they drove off the ferries. The machines were passed against the sides of goods lorries; they could detect the sound of a human heartbeat.

  Luke stared out at the crowd, all pink-faced and squinting angrily in the sunshine. On the wall in front of a TV camera and a reporter was a girl in a tight T-shirt with a swastika on it. She had large round breasts, which distorted the obscene symbol; her legs were fat and white and muscular. She glanced in Luke's direction and the idea of eye-contact with her frightened him so much that he hurried on with his head down. Two men wearing 'Save Dover' baseball caps came briskly across his path, their bodies already attuned to the vigour of the demonstration. A police helicopter circled and buzzed threateningly overhead. Mounted officers in riot gear, like space-age knights, flashed sunlight off their plastic shields as their horses jogged and stamped.

  Luke walked on past the crowd and stopped by one of the seafront boarding-houses where three teenage girls stood smoking and observing from a safe distance. 'Matt's down there,' one said, nodding her mirrored sunglasses at the crowd.

  'Yeah?'

  'Yeah. He done his big sign this morning.'

  'Yeah? Matt did? What's it say?'

  'He nicked one of Mum's sheets—she went mental.'

  'What's it say, Michelle? What did he put?' the youngest-looking one asked.

  'It said,"Scum down the drain not in Dover."'

  'What's that got to do with anything?'

  The other two laughed and rolled their eyes at each other.

  'Asylum scum? Ring any bells, Saz?'

  'Fuck—I'm still mash-up from last night.' She shook her head as if she was clearing it of a blockage.

  'You always say that. D'you know you always say that?'

  'No.'

  'Well, you do. We ought to get down there, really. Don't you think, Jem?' A litde way off, two police officers had stopped a young man and asked him to empty his pockets. One searched through his wallet, while the other watched him take things out of his jeans and hold them up in a pantomime of scandalized innocence.

  'Don't, Michelle,' Saz said, eyeing this spectacle. 'It's dangerous.'

  'Ooooh,' laughed the other girl. 'I wonder who sounds just like their mum. Like their do-goody leftie mum.'

  'Come on, I don't,' Saz said, knowing full well that, unlike her weirdly passionate mother, all she felt was fear of physical harm.

  'Yeah. Your mum's a loony leftie, Dad says. She'd let all the dross in to take all the jobs and housing in Dover. She'd probably give them her bed, too. Bit of money for a fucking ice-cream.'

  Michelle and Jem laughed.

  'No, she wouldn't,' Saz said. 'That's just crap. We hate them.'

  Jem spat her chewing-gum into the road suddenly and said, 'They should burn. They should petrol-bomb the lot of them, the scroungers.' She looked right into Saz's face as if it had been discovered that she was to blame and this was the moment of confrontation. 'Taking all our fucking jobs and money,' she said, 'bringing in AIDS.'

  Luke walked quickly away from them along the seafront. He had never heard anything like this before. English people hating like this. Girls hating like this. Young girls—no more than fourteen years old. Behind him the crowd shouted, 'Out! Out! Out!' and he walked as fast as he could until he could no longer make out the words.

  He wound his way back towards the town centre where it felt safer. He could not believe this was where his father had grown up. He walked past the slot-machine arcade and the pawnbroker with its shamefaced-looking watches and rings and televisions and the 'Everything under £1' shop where you could get dusters and plastic laundry baskets and hairspray and felt slippers. There was the sweaty smell of onions and burgers frying and in a nearby street an ice-cream van played its melancholy, tinkling music.

  When Luke thought of his own childhood and schooling and the house he had grown up in, he knew he carried them with him wher
ever he went. His mother's taste was evident in his choice of ties; his father's professional authority was behind his capacity to send bad food back in a restaurant; his school sporting victories had given him the physical confidence with which he swung open a door or caught a bunch of keys that were thrown to him across a room. Where had his father allowed his past to contribute to his personality? Looking around, it was impossible to say.

  It had never occurred either to Luke or to Sophie before that their father did not refer to his childhood and had only mentioned vaguely that he went to a school in Sussex that they would never have heard of. Luke imagined Sophie had also pictured a minor boarding-school—a litde like their schools, but smaller. But his father's life had been nothing like theirs. Their father had been poor. He had grown up alone with his poor mother in the kind of house that poor people lived in, with damp stains and rust and worn-out furniture.

  What did it mean to hide that much about yourself? Wasn't it pretending to be someone else? For a moment, Luke felt as if he had been burgled. He had frightened himself and he pictured his father and thought: Who are you?

  But Luke had recently had reason to become passionately conscious of how easy it was not to be yourself, to become a fake or an approximation. He felt that he had not been himself at all since Arianne left. In fact, he distinctly remembered feeling that he had not been himself until the day she arrived. This meant he had been himself (except in the presence of his father, in front of whom he was always someone shy and awkward and hateful) for a total of about twelve weeks.

  Twelve weeks, out of all his twenty-eight years. This was plainly ridiculous. Wasn't it? He did not like the idea—and this would apply to his mother, too—that other people were as chaotic and unfixed as he had proved to be.

  Automatically he had made his way back to the seafront again and the broad, flat sight of the Channel was consoling after his intricate thoughts. He stood still and ht a cigarette.

  'Hello, excuse me? Do you have free cigarette, please?' said a foreign voice. Luke spun round to see a tall, black-haired man with a deeply furrowed brow. He was wearing a woman's anorak over a threadbare blue jumper. A dirty handkerchief was tied round an injury to his wrist. On the wall, a litde way off from him, was a starved-looking girl. Something mutually affirmative about the angle of their bodies suggested they were together.

  'Yeah, sure,' Luke said, fumbling in his jeans pocket. 'D'you both want one?' He glanced at the girl. Her skinny legs dangled like one at peace in her daydreams, but the heel that banged the wall in triplicate from time to time gave her a tense, military air, as if a marching tune was playing in her head. The man called out, 'Mila, cigaretu?'

  She was gazing out to sea and at first she seemed to be squinting at the distance or because of the strong sunshine, but when she turned her pinched face in their direction her expression remained the same.

  'Thank you,' she said, as she arrived beside them. Luke handed her the cigarette and she waited for him to light it, saying, 'Thank you', again in exactly the careful way Luke said, 'Grazie', all the time in Italy, because it was all he really knew how to say.

  'Can you speak English?' Luke asked her.

  "Very bad,' she said, and lowered her eyes.

  'I speak,' the man said. He put out his hand. 'Goran. Great to meet you.'

  'Luke,' said Luke, a litde unnerved by the man's unexpected American accent.

  'This is Mila.'

  The girl shook his hand awkwardly.

  'So, where are you from?' Luke said.

  'You know Kosovo?' said Goran.

  Immediately Luke felt that he did not watch enough news, that he skipped the long articles in the papers, and that he lacked original opinions for dinner parties.

  'Um — yes. Yes — the war,' he said, unthinkingly, remembering something about the Albanians and the Serbs and a news clip of a girl with a gun on her back, saying she would defend Serbia until she died in the snow. 'Yes, of course. Of course I do.'

  'We are from there. We are Serbs. And you are English?'

  'Yes.'

  Goran nodded approvingly.

  'Pretty boring, really,' Luke said, smiling.

  'What is boring?'

  'Just English—I meant.'

  'I'm sorry I have misunderstand you.'

  'No—just I mean so much more interesting to come from Kosovo, that's all I meant, not just from boring England.'

  Goran laughed. 'Boring England? I hope it is the most boring place in the world. This is why we came. We have enough of interesting Kosovo.'

  'Look, I'm sorry—I'm not putting things ...' It was not as if the articles were that long—or as if he had anything so much better to do. He read the Style section, the sports pages. Why? Because he was superficial. That was why Arianne had got bored with him.

  Goran waved his hand genially, dismissing Luke's embarrassment. 'So, you live here in Dover?'

  'Me? No. God, no—I'm from London. Holland Park. I'm just here for the day. A day trip.'

  'Ah, yes? From London?'

  'Yes. Have you been there?'

  Goran smiled. 'No. We have been inside England just twenty-four hours.'

  'Yes I see. Not much time to look around, then.'

  Luke listened as Goran and Mila began to talk in whatever their language was. The exchange became heated, with Goran appearing to disagree with something Mila had suggested. It was odd how you could work it out. Goran ended the conversation firmly with 'Ne, Mila.'

  She stared at him with her ravenous eyes and Luke thought she would have been quite pretty if her face had not been so thin. But she looked feverish—endangered. Luke wondered how old she was and decided she might be anything between twenty-four and thirty-four.

  'OK. Thank you for these cigarettes,' Goran said. 'We must go now.'

  Luke wanted to ask where they were going. He wanted to ask Goran how old he was because he might have been about the same age as Luke, but he seemed much older.

  This act of comparing himself with other people of his own age had started to preoccupy Luke. The talk-shows he had watched obsessively for the past two weeks had fascinated him in this respect. Every so often litde descriptions flashed up at the bottom of the screen, under the shouting faces: 'Shewanda from Detroit, 21. Mom of three'. They all looked so much older than they were and it had occurred to him for the first time that this was what happened to you if you had a difficult life, if you were poor. He had studied his stupid baby face in the sitting-room mirror and wondered if he would look older for losing Arianne. 'OK, then. Was nice to meet you. Goodbye,' Goran said, raising his hand.

  Luke wanted to stop him. He wanted to say, 'Excuse me, but what have you come to England for? Will you tell me about your lives, because I never read the long articles in the newspapers and I don't know anything about the world.' But instead he stood there with a paralysed smile on his face as they walked away in the sunshine, smoking his cigarettes.

  Chapter 12

  'You'll appreciate the property is in poor condition, Mr Langford,' said Mr Wilson, the surveyor. 'There is rising damp, there is rot—both dry and wet—and there is significant structural damage to the roof. I'm also sorry to inform you that the plumbing is in poor repair and...'

  There was something obscene about this summation. To Alistair, it was almost as if his mother's body was being criticized, not her house. Her worn hands, her aching hips and back, the ankle that had always given her trouble since she twisted it trying to carry in the coal when it had snowed.

  '...and I'm afraid the boiler is nothing short of a museum piece,' he went on.

  'Yes, I appreciate all of that,' Alistair said. 'Why don't we just decide on a realistic price and do this as simply as possible?'

  'OK. Well, I'll give you a detailed breakdown, of course, but I think we might get £40,000 for it, Mr Langford. At a push.'

  Suddenly Alistair wanted him out—him and his clipboard, his breakdown, his pushing. He wanted to be alone in the house with his nostalgia, free
of this earthbound presence in its shiny suit.

  'As I say, I will send you through a breakdown in the next few days, Mr Langford.'

  'Yes,' Alistair said, hurrying him towards the door. 'Thank you. Thank you very much.' He could not help reacting to the surveyor's alarmed expression:'I'm sorry—I'm in a bit of a rush,' he explained.

  'I see. Well, goodbye, then, Mr Langford.'

  'Goodbye.'

  When the door was shut, Alistair let the familiar dim light of the hallway sink into him. It felt like drinking. He ran his fingers along the uneven wall, he inhaled the musty smell of the old carpet and then he pressed his weight on the second stair up to hear the creak. He found there were tears running down his face and he rolled his eyes in gentle mockery of himself and sighed.

  He had not been alone in the house for a moment when he and Luke had first visited it and he realized that his son's presence had spared him these depths of ... whatever it was that he was feeling.

  He looked down at his shoes on the patterned carpet. His mother had died just where he was standing. He moved his feet quickly as if he were walking on her grave. Then he sat down on the stairs and looked out at the hallway for the first time like an intimate of the place, one whose eyes were ready to forgive and love any deterioration they saw, as one loves the lines on an old friend's face.

  His mother had written to him once, after the birth of Sophie was announced in The Times. She had been shown the clipping by Geoff, she said. Alistair remembered how Geoff had always skimmed through the births and deaths in every one of the newspapers he ordered into his shop—'Just in case,' he would explain smilingly to a young, fidgeting Alistair. 'Because life's going on, Al, beginning and ending all over the place,' he would say.

  Alistair had been allowed to sit on the counter beside the till, his eyes rioting over the penny sweets in their glorious rainbow of jars on the shelves. Jelly babies, flying saucers, sherbet balls, liquorice sticks, chocolate buttons and strawberry chews. Geoff flicked the pages of a newspaper in the background, indulging his peculiar, boring adult whim. Then he would ruffle Alistair's hair, reach up behind him and put his magician's hand into one of the jars. Geoff could produce pear drops, peppermint creams—anything.