Suzerain: a ghost story

by Adrian John Smith

  He buys a melon. Shops around for the biggest fucking melon he can find. Sets it square in the middle of the kitchen table, hits the lampshade when he raises the bat. Who's the soft cunt now, he says. Smack! Pips and juice and pink flesh like the spatter of Saturday night vomit in the rain-lashed glow of the orange street lamps. Wipes the bat clean with a tea-towel. Feels better. A short-lived catharsis because when he looks in the mirror what he sees is the yellow-blue bruises beneath his eyes and beneath the stubble on his jaw line. The stitching in his lip. In short, one soft and beaten-up cunt, gingerly touching the bruises with his good hand, wishing he wrote right-handed. Masturbates right-handed. Smokes dope and thinks of Moira and all this time that bitch hasn't even phoned. Grits his teeth when he comes into a towel which he keeps beneath the bed. You bitch, he says. Oh you bitch. Rain rattles off the slate roof, a tragic gust against the window. Anything at all to fuck her again is the way he feels when he's stoned. Sober, straight, he almost phones her. Hangs up when he thinks about what could happen if he does.

  "What's it about?" Jane says, meaning the novel.

  "It's about a man who wakes up one morning and finds a coypu in his garden." More of his bullshit.

  "Wow," she says. "Cool. That's really neat. What's a coypu?"

  "It's like a giant beaver cum guinea pig. Big fucking thing, teeth like fucking chisels," he says. Doesn't mention that he can't grip a pen with these bandaged sausages for fingers. That he writes a little on the lap-top but can't type as well with his right hand and in any case he's got nothing to say. Nothing he feels like saying.

  "Maybe you could send me some of it to read," she says and before he can answer he hears the soft wooden scrape of the street door opening.

  For a second he just stands there, listening. He can't see the door from where he stands but he can hear it close. Someone closing it after entering the kitchen. He drops the receiver, takes the stairs three at a time, hauling himself up with the banister rail. He grabs the bat from beside the bed, feels its weight, tests a swing. He stands at the top of the stair for a moment, just listens, with his heart hammering hard. He counts to three, and then walks slowly down the stairs, the bat leading the way.

  He pauses at the threshold to the kitchen, can hear the garrulous inquisition of the empty air coming from the phone receiver swinging slightly on its cord, cocks the bat at his shoulder, horribly and belatedly aware of the inadequacy of his one-handed swing - a gesture towards violence rather than violence itself. Melons, he realises, are one thing. Big, hard, cropped-haired bastards intent on violence another. Yet, for all that he counts silently to three and then steps quickly, purposefully into the kitchen. The empty kitchen. There are his groceries. There is the door, firmly closed. The wind outside. He crosses the kitchen, takes the key from the table, and very carefully, feeling every increment of movement in every piece of mechanism in the lock, turns the key. This is how it's been for him lately. Next time he pisses, he sprinkles it all over the fucking floor.

  The funny thing is that he begins to write again that same day. Four-thirty in the afternoon, getting dark, coffee and a cigarette on the go, tap tap, tap tap tap at the computer, he writes about Moira. They meet in the Dolphin, a drunk dancing with the pub's dog, holding its paws like you'd dance with a child at the kind of party where even the children are drunk. What are you doing here, he says (bold, fortified with Jack Daniel's) as she slides into the seat beside him. Trawling the bars for fisherman is what, she says. He thinks it's a joke. It isn't. I'm a writer, she tells him. I've always wanted to meet an American writer, he says. Well now you have, she tells him. Don't be intimidated. We've had our century. Maybe you'll get this one. That's not the way it seems to be shaping up, he says. Local colour, she says, that's what I need. That's what I'm looking for. I'm not local, he says, but I can be colourful when I want to be. Let's have a drink. You know, she says, I haven't got to go home tonight if you've got somewhere we can go. Are you famous, he says. Yes, she says, (moderately, she qualifies) but even so, you'll never know who I am. Maybe I'll find out. You won't, she says.

  The next funny thing is that just as he starts to feel the benefit of this exercise (sometime around seven-thirty); that by doing this he can put her behind him, lay the whole episode to rest, get out of this fucking town; just as he (almost paradoxically) begins to feel libidinous, writing about the first time she takes him home, Frank away, Frank unknown, Frank unconsidered, Frank just a mild inconvenience, takes him home to her rich-bitch pile, a nineteenth century ship builder's house with many rooms, some renovated, some not, standing on a high hill overlooking Yarlmouth and the river, just as he gets to the part where she - the phone rings and of course it's her. Moira. He looks at the phone for a long time without picking it up. Then he picks it up.

  "Hi Jamie," she says. "Jay," she corrects herself. "How are you?"

  "Broken," he says.

  "That was unpleasant. Sorry. I expect you've been wondering why I didn't stay with you but I had to leave. I had to get that guy away from you. I had to stop him hurting you some more." She sighs. "It's been difficult Jay. Frank. Fucking Frank. He's been watching me like a goddamned hawk. But don't think I haven't been thinking about you because I have been thinking about you," she says. "I've been thinking about you a lot. Frank's gone away on business. It's safe. We can be safe. It hasn't been safe, Jay, but now it is. I want to see you. I need to see you. How about it?"

  "I don't know Moira," he says. "I don't need more trouble."

  She ignores his resistance. She's right to ignore it.

  "I'll come by," she says. "It'll be quite late. I want it to be like it used to be," she says, by which she means she'll come in the night with him already in bed. All ready, and in bed.

  "I don't leave the door unlocked anymore," he says. "I expect you can guess why."

  "Oh Jay, is that petulance in your voice? I think I need to come and cure you of that."

  He doesn't answer.

  "You want to play safe, you should get a job in a bank. Hope it doesn't get robbed."

  "I'm no good with numbers," he says,

  "You're taking my point right? It's all experience right?"

  "Oh yeah, right. Grist for the fucking mill. Except that I'm the fucking grist - which would make you, what?"

  "Bullshit, Jay; the only millstone you should worry about is your own lack of guts."

  "I don't leave the door unlocked."

  "Come on Jay. You can do it. Hey look, don't wimp out on me now. Okay? We've still got a lot of interesting things to do."

  "I need one good hand Moira. That's what I'm interested in."

  He hears a sigh of exasperation and flinches a little.

  "Show a little backbone for Christ's sake," she says. "Look, nothing can hurt you. I'm back in control. You'll be okay. Have a drink. Have a toke. Relax. I'll be there. Just don't start without me, okay?"

  Without saying okay, he hangs up and then, with the resignation of a condemned man, he shuts down the computer. The chapter isn't finished after all. Then, and now with the more ambivalent resignation of a condemned man who knows his death will be ecstatic, he opens a bottle of wine and begins to drink.

  He unlocks the door before he goes to bed. Drunk, he nevertheless stands there looking at the key in the lock for a long time. There's a clear sky and it's cold and the gulls are flying long after dark in the orange light drenching the harbour. There's a wind and a roughish sea. Ships' lights out there beyond the harbour wall. His heart starts when a plastic cup rattles down the street below the bedroom window. Starts again when the lifeboat canon is fired. Wishes he'd drunk more. Drinks more, swigging from the bottle. Hears the door open. Doesn't start because he knows how she sounds - he ought to - coming into his kitchen in the night. There's a candle that gutters in the draught from the window. They like some light to fuck by. He lights a joint. He knows it's her but is still relieved when it's her silhouette that appears in the bedroom doorway. She kisses his bandaged fingers, lightly to
uches his stitched lip. Poor baby, she says, but she's harder than he remembers. Her eyes are harder. Her voice is harder. Her body is harder. She takes the joint and smokes deeply. She fucks him hard. God I need this god I need this she says. They come together, he with a groan, she with a shuddering cry. Collapses onto his chest. Both sweating, both breathing hard. Jesus, he says. I've missed you. Was it worth it, she says. Christ yes, he says. I hope so, she says. I really do. I'm going to get a glass of water, she says. Can I get you anything? No, he says, I'm fine. That's good, she says.

  He closes his eyes. A pleasant half doze. Twenty minutes, thirty, they can do it all over. Footsteps on the stair. Quiet. Something stirs inside him because something is wrong. He opens his eyes just as someone fills the doorway. Not Moira.

  Billy lights a cigarette. Gratuitous. Using the lighter flame to light his face. "Hello Jay," he says. "Good to see you again."

  Moira appears beside him, still naked. She drapes an arm around Billy's neck, pulls his face down to hers, kisses him. Then she says, "Oh Jay, don't look so surprised; it's not like you weren't warned."

  "Shall I do it now?" Billy says.

  "Why not," Moira says, but it isn't a question.

  Aware that he's doing it, yet unable to stop, he begins to scream, sounding, to his own surprise, very much like a woman. He forgets all about the bat until Billy, one of life's opportunists, hands Moira his cigarette and picks it up.

  "Nice bat Jay," he says. "I think we might find a use for such a nice bat."

  Karen (Summer 2004)

  Suzy has left me alone for the evening. Her constant underlying dissatisfaction with being here, exacerbated by the fact that I have been house-bound for three days because of my injury (and whose fault is that?), is in danger of opening up a distance between us. Twelve old men and a dog, is how she characterised the clientele of the pub she visited last night. You know, Suze, I told her, you can always go home. I just might, she'd said. For my part, I'd been reasonably content to watch the river traffic from the balcony while potential ideas for my paper drifted in and out of my mind.

  Yesterday afternoon, when, returning from town with the newspaper and cigarettes that it had taken her three hours to secure, alcohol evident in her greeting kiss, Suzy had asked me (with faux-spontaneity - "Oh, hey, by the way…") if I wanted to attend a creative writing workshop this evening, I, of course (perhaps too sniffily) declined. She pushed her usual line in order to persuade me. It would be fun. It would do me good. I was in danger (so went the implication) of becoming a bore, and Suzy (so went my inference) was on hand to make sure that that didn't happen. If it's because of your toe, she said, I'll drive you there. And if the car won't start, I'll fucking carry you there. Then she had asked me if it wouldn't make a change to write something which wasn't necessarily informed by half the contents of the British fucking Library. In response, in defence, I'd said: One) I really need to make a start on this paper (I'd settled on The Politics of Masturbation in Emily Dickinson) and Two) those things, those classes, are invariably populated by literary desperadoes of the worst stripe and colour. Long-term no-hopers annealed with bitterness; neophytes too willing to pour out their oh-so-sensitive hearts via the worst doggerel you can imagine. (Which was a mouthful.)

  You never did like my poetry, Karen. Did you? Suzy said.

  I gave her an acid smile; a contempt-it-deserves smile. Then I asked her where the writing class was held.

  It's in that old church, on the way to town - the de-whatever-ized one.

  De-sanctified, I suggest.

  Whatever. The one with all the bric-a-brac and stuff outside.

  On Saturday, on the way to the cottage, there had been a three car jam in the bottleneck ahead, a long enough pause for us to study the church through the car window. I remember that there were wind-chimes and hanging mobiles (of fish and gulls and boats cut from tin) silent and immobile in the still air. A bush hung with a dozen or so painted CDs. Old leather work boots lining the stone steps. A slate turret above the entrance and flying buttresses high above that. A sign saying ALL WELCOME.

  Suzy told me that she had seen the ad for the class pinned to the noticeboard outside the church on her way back from town. Always Wanted To Write? It would say. Why Not Let A Published Writer Help You Release Your Creativity? Something like that. I imagine Suzy, brow furrowed, (for some reason I have her munching on a Braeburn apple), reading the notices there as if they are as indeterminate as Ahab's doubloon. The ad would be amongst others for dubious accommodation, homeopathic remedies, paths toward self-healing workshops, classes in astrology, palmistry and rune reading. It was an image guaranteed to make me pass on Suzy's invitation to join her.

  And so, alone, I sip at a glass of wine. Yes, sip. I've stopped taking the tablets the doctor gave me - the swelling in my toe is virtually gone now, as is the nasty discoloration (I've removed the dressing) - but I don't know for how long the tablets will linger in my bloodstream. Until I'd poured this glass of wine - which I feel I deserve - I hadn't drunk any alcohol so far and I want to monitor the effect carefully. I have no desire to compound the bad start to my stay here by falling - by making myself - ill. This is a victory over the self-destructive hedonism of the past. This is a war I feel I'm winning. Evidence this - my abstinence when Suzy lit a lunchtime joint. Though it would have made for a pleasant drift through the afternoon, I was determined to start work today. The paper itself, though important, is less important than what it represents. A minor piece of work - the kind of thing I used to trot out in little more than a weekend - it is nevertheless synecdochic of my re-found commitment to my job. Since Stephen's death, there had been far too much carnival, and not enough Lent. And now that I am redressing the balance, I won't allow myself to fall apart again; to blow this last chance. To shit, amongst other things, on David's beneficence. I am determined to be match-fit (as Paul might have said) for the autumn term. And with Suzy otherwise engaged for the evening, I had window enough to make a decent start.

  Smoking the entire spliff herself, Suzy had used henna to render intricate Celtic designs onto the tops of her feet, running from her ankle to the gaps between her toes. Then she thought it might be some cool magic to draw an elongated representation of a dog onto the side of my violated foot because the Celts (she said) believed dogs to have healing properties. Because of the way they lick their wounds, she said. With this accomplished, and after confusing herself over some distinction or non-distinction between contagious and sympathetic magic, she fell into silence and sat glassy eyed in the sun for another hour watching me read. After that, she had gone to bed to sleep away the remainder of the afternoon - which had left me without distraction to re-familiarise myself with Dickinson's poems in order to scratch out some initial analysis this evening - which I have now done.

  It had been a pleasant shift from the sun-on-the-page afternoon, to the warm green shadow of evening - something I'd gauged during the pauses I made in my reading whenever a gull-mobbed fishing boat chugged up the river. When the tide ebbed I'd walked to the end of the balcony, leaned on the balustrade and smoked a cigarette while I watched the oyster catchers and wag-tails dibbing the wet, brown sand. I noticed how the sand turns silver as it dries. This was the longest time I'd spent standing since I'd been stung.

  Then I woke Suzy with a cup of tea. She rubbed at her eyes. Jesus, she said, that's some strong stuff. Meaning the smoke.

  You'd better shower Suze, I said, sitting on the edge of the bed, brushing back her damp hair, kissing her on the cheek. You'll be late for class, I added, in case she'd forgotten. I saw by the brief, quizzical crease around her eyes that she had forgotten.

  Come with me, Karen. Please, she pleaded. I don't want to go on my own.

  You'll be fine, I said. I kissed the top of her head, pushing deeply into her hair. It was partly a gesture of affection, partly a gesture of encouragement. But also, perhaps, a gesture of apology. It hadn't occurred to me before that I was being selfish. That Suzy really didn'
t want to go to this silly, parochial writing class on her own. I thought of her on the back of a Harley, I thought of her dancing in a too-loud swirl of feedback where bikers belly up to the bar. I thought of her with her self-disfiguring boyfriend and her capacity for verbal assault, her tongue like a switchblade, and I marvelled at, and was touched by, her vulnerability.

  I left Suzy to drink her tea and take her shower and I went (with the slightest of limps) to the kitchen to make a salad. Feeling something like the afterthought of pain in my toe then, I put the cutting board, knife and bowl on the kitchen table along with everything I needed from the fridge, so that I could sit down as I worked. Even though I'm healing well (and the crutches they'd given me at the hospital now seemed like sheer hyperbole) I really want to walk the coast path - and the sooner the better - and so decided to adhere to the medical advice for the rest of the day, just in case.

  I sliced and eviscerated peppers, scraping out the seed of red, green and yellow alike. I shredded lettuce, grated carrots, pollarded spring onions. I sliced cucumber and tomatoes. I cut and buttered the bread, unwrapped the cheese.

  This was the first meal I'd prepared since Sunday, since my encounter with the alien species (which Suzy still insists was a jelly-fish). On Monday (call it spite; call it revenge; admit that it was petty) I'd had Suzy cook me a piece of steak. Wouldn't you rather have fish? Suzy said. Haddock? I know you like haddock. There's a good greengrocer in town, so I could probably score some fresh dill.

  No. I'd said, I really fancy a nice piece of steak. Maybe with onion rings. French mustard.