On the Floor

by Aifric Campbell

  Dad stared out the teatime window until we both gave up on the wordless strain and picked at our plates in front of the TV, the evenings passing in a blur of sitcoms and canned laughter. I slopped through my homework, cutting every grade down to the bone. I slouched into a wilful and persistent under-achievement at school, learnt to hide my oddity behind a teenage mask of jaded non-engagement. My father sighed at my report cards and then just stopped bothering to read them. In his eyes a disconnect. A not-there. And as the years passed I tried my hardest not to be a comfort to him. Getting pissed, getting stoned, staying out all night. Sometimes I met him Sunday mornings in the hallway on his way to Mass and it was almost as if he wasn’t sure who I was. ‘You lucky bitch,’ sighed Emer, twirling a bottle of blue nail varnish. ‘You can do whatever you want.’

  I low-balled into Arts at UCD. I skipped lectures and spent three years looking for answers in the stale air of the library. I read everything, a spine-numbing search through the chronicles of mankind’s obsession with the mysteries of universe and mind, as if understanding could somehow kill the pain. But I never found an answer to my question. The one that stuck was Stekel’s address at the 1910 symposium of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society: ‘No one kills himself who has never wanted to kill another.’ Suicide as murder transposed. I’d sit staring out the window at the stagnant lake, thinking, who was Kieran trying to kill? But the fact is my memory was fading, I was forgetting but I was still clinging onto anger. It seemed a safer place to be.

  And then one afternoon in my final year I wandered into a campus milk-round, and was captivated by Steiner’s sleek linguistic promise, the shoe-shine dazzle of applied corporate intelligence, the groomed and barely harnessed ambition. There was a pristine glow about the evangelical speakers that cast a dull pall over the whole auditorium, the campus, my life, my hair. And in the crisp white collars and impeccable suits I saw the first glimmer of a quick route out of stagnation to a place where I might want to be, where my special talent would be my passport. Something within began to shift, the first stirrings of a survival instinct. I had found a stepping-stone that would bridge the aching gap between the past and future.

  A month later I stumbled off a plane onto a trading floor, where a hygienic-looking American managing director failed to ambush me in an interview chat about calculus and I thought, looking at the photo of his ranch in Wyoming: a performing dog can make good money in a place like this. And I did.

  After three years hunched between my book towers in the library, it was a breeze to catapult from the back of the class to the number-one slot. On the day of the results the lecturers who had spent months issuing me warnings flitted round my First in effusive bewilderment, while the rest of my class slunk past, shooting resentful glances from under their mortar boards at the bandit who had stolen the show. The head of Ethics asked me if I’d like to come and have tea. The departmental head sidled up and asked if I’d considered a doctorate. But I could sense the circular emptiness of academic struggles, two thousand years trying to answer the same fucking question. I showed him my interview letter from Steiner’s and his face creased into a sneering derision.

  But I had a hunch that the energy of a repressed fury could fuel a great career, and I was right. I had found a kind of sheltered housing, a nice desk to rest my weary head, a little slot that fit so snugly, a place to call my own. An audience that would applaud my circus trick, a showering of corporate affections to fill the empty space: promotions, money, a cloak of power. Home is where the work is. Consumed by fourteen-hour days, a busyness that replaced distraction with exhaustion. And then one day, I realised I wasn’t looking for answers anymore. Mostly it was like the past was someone else’s movie. I had found a new virtual life, a historyless reinvention that I could almost believe in. To be so desired, to be so exactly loved that it could be quantified, that I could see it in the numbers – a big, fat, back-slapping cheque at the end of each year, isn’t that all the proof a person needs? Like someone who wants to fuck you every minute of every day just to prove the extent of their love.

  The window is aglow with the city’s pulse. And in the top corner a sliver of moon. We may have slept a little, knocked out by the drone of stories and dream and the foul taste of the past. Pie Man stirs, swallows, passes a palm over his face and holds it there in the shaft of hallway light. His watch says 22:02. Rex yawns, raises his head and licks my free hand.

  The mattress shifts. Pie Man shuffles round to my side, bends down and unties the dog lead. He lifts my arm and rubs it tenderly between his hands as if willing it back to life. And then he turns away, steps out into the hall and I hear him click the latch on the front door and retreat into the living room. I sit up. Rex stands, stretches and I swing my legs round and onto the floor but remain sitting, listening. The draught steals along the floor to my toes, there is a faint sound of footsteps down the corridor, a door closing with a distant bang. I grab at my scattered clothes, dress quickly. Rex watches, a low impatient whine. I grab my bag and creep barefoot into the hallway.

  Pie Man sits on the couch in the living room, his fat head buried in his fat hands. He doesn’t move. I pick up my shoes and edge backwards to the door. Rex stands guarding the space between us but Pie Man remains bent like a figure on stage who will stay till the curtains close. Rex trots ahead and I turn and I run down the corridor, the stairs, Rex taking the skittering lead, through the front door and out onto the night street.

  10

  clawback

  wednesday 16 january 1991

  22:26

  Out of the crooked timber of humanity,

  no straight thing can be made.

  Emmanuel Kant

  THE DOOR OPENS ONTO A creased and anxious caution.

  ‘Geri—’ Stephen pauses with a phone dangling in his left hand. Rex sits beside me, shockingly demure, not hurling himself at Stephen, not even looking at him, just leaning against my leg.

  ‘Come in,’ Stephen swings the door just a little too wide, looking into the space behind me as if expecting I’m not alone.

  My lips part into what might seem like a crazed grin since I can’t seem to find my voice. I step onto the mat and then sideways into the hall and out of his force field. Stephen mutters something into the receiver and hangs up.

  He crouches down, ‘Come on, Rex.’ And Rex growls, low, faint, but a warning all the same. Stephen straightens up and moves back slowly and Rex slinks past him to my side.

  Stephen scans me up and down – with my coatless shoulders, my bare legs, I am visible trouble in his hallway. He opens his mouth then clamps shut on whatever words he was about to speak. He is trying to read my agenda: is this howling revenge for the fuck or the fuckover? But even I do not know why I have come except that standing by the cab window with the rain whipping at my cheeks, my voice was dying, fading out like the sound of not being me anymore and Stephen’s address was all I could produce.

  ‘You – eh – you’ve cut your hand.’ He looks at my bandaged knuckles. ‘And your wrist is all swollen. Or something.’ And the years of solicitous upbringing almost propel him towards me but he stops short. My teeth start chattering loudly as if a switch has been thrown. To touch him would be a high-voltage fry.

  Stephen recovers his poise, shifts into crisis-aversion gear and announces that ice would be just the thing for that wrist. He disappears into the kitchen, urging me to shed my coat and sit down. He doesn’t offer the living room.

  All along the hallway are neat stacks of cardboard packing boxes that appear to be full. I stand rooted in the corridor, watching his grey T-shirt as he moves between the freezer and the cupboard, rattling on in an upbeat distant monologue about how he was just making some calls and watching Newsnight and the countdown to the war. He is keeping up a steady stream, as if his chatter could keep disaster at bay, like a charm to ward off evil. Like the way you’d try to calm an unannounced crazy who shows up late at night on your doorstep with a dog who used to love you but now clearly
hates your guts. His bare feet squeak as he turns towards me with a Pyrex bowl of ice and a roll of kitchen towel. ‘Here, this’ll help.’ I step obediently into the kitchen, drop my bag on the floor and sit down over a mug of black coffee. Rex slips under the table and settles in a ball at my feet.

  I tear off three sheets of the white paper and fashion them into a jagged bag of ice, I pat and press it hard against my wrist. ‘It burns.’

  And Stephen says that will help, it will stimulate the blood flow and minimise bruising. Then he asks me in a quieter voice if I want to tell him what happened. ‘No.’ I raise my head to look at his face for the first time.

  ‘Are you sure?’ He considers me gravely. As you might examine an injured pet.

  ‘Yes. I’m sure.’

  I first stepped into this apartment on 3 July 1986, strolled straight into the kitchen, sat down on this very table right here, and lit a cigarette. Stephen leaned in the open doorway, jacket over his shoulder as I exhaled and said, ‘So what are you going to do about it – kick me out?’ He moved towards me, took the cigarette from my fingers and flicked it expertly behind him into the sink, lowering his head towards mine until it was so dark I couldn’t see, but I could feel our lips part at precisely the same moment. For days afterwards I would slide my tongue around the inside of my mouth, trying to figure out how his kisses made me feel like coming.

  ‘So you’re moving?’

  ‘Yes, actually,’ says Stephen and looks behind to the hall as if he’s checking the boxes are still there.

  ‘Anywhere nice?’

  ‘New York. To run the office there.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. After this week’s stunt you’re ready for anything.’

  ‘You’re upset.’ And he nods sadly, as if to say this is no more than he had expected.

  ‘HAAH,’ I hear myself laugh. Only Stephen could defuse this situation with an understatement that so completely captures the heart of the matter and the extent of the gulf between us. ‘There is just one question I wanted to ask you.’

  Anyone else would be wary of my rage but Stephen knows exactly where my boundaries lie and he does not feel at all threatened. I am not in the least bit dangerous. His assessment is, as always, correct, since it would seem that my anger has been entirely displaced by grief, a deep, low, raw and private gash.

  ‘Shoot.’ He leans against the door jamb, arms folded. Wriggles his naked toes. I look at him full face and, it seems for maybe the very first time, with clarity. Stephen is ready and prepared for all eventualities but answers are suddenly irrelevant. I see now that it was always the question that was important. All’s fair in love and war and Stephen is precisely the man I know him to be.

  ‘“My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart under my feet.”’ I offer up his favourite Eliot quote and he smiles. That will teach me to listen more carefully.

  ‘And your question?’

  I flick it away and he nods.

  ‘But congratulations. New York is a big step. Even for you.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m looking forward to a new challenge,’ and with a professional smile he disappears down the hallway to the low-volume murmur of the TV.

  The ice bag pulses and stings. I want to smoke. But I have done enough by showing up unannounced. I move towards the balcony doors, where I used to like standing barefoot, even in winter, turning my glass to keep the ice cubes circling until they melted, looking down on the street and the roofs of speeding cars heading north and south along Beaufort Street. In daytime you can just see a little brown section of the river from here. I used to stand in this spot and time the passing cars. The average number in a one-minute period between 1 and 2 p.m. at weekends is fifty-four. Between 1 and 2 a.m. it falls to seventeen and a third of those are cabs. The average rush-hour speed in Central London is 11 mph. The incidence of German cars is approximately 1 in 4, but of course that is very zone-specific, you can’t extrapolate to a nationwide profile.

  Night folds around me like an envelope, I can feel the cold rising ghostlike from the river, lapping like a wave around my feet. Shut the door, it’s freezing, Stephen would say, so I’d close the door behind me, not ready to come in, not yet, needing to breathe. The hollow nightfall, the transition hours before sleep or not-sleep, before the sudden clarity that hits me at 2 a.m., where I used to think I could do some of my best work, if only there was something that needed doing. Night-trading I guess, but all the Asian openings were over there, not here.

  Of course that is exactly what I should have done back then: switch countries. There are worse places than Hong Kong. I could have given Rex away temporarily to a good home, told Stephen to wait for me, to hold on, pretending that wasn’t absurd, knowing the impossibility of maintaining a relationship at a distance. Or it would seem, even at close range. I hear the distant click of heels and lean over, looking down to my left where a lone girl picks her unsteady way along the pavement towards the Kings Road. Black or navy coat, white scarf, gloveless, shiny leather bag that keeps slipping down her shoulder, I half-shout ‘HI’, thinking it will somehow embolden or encourage, but she doesn’t hear. If anything happens on Beaufort Street I will at least be a witness.

  Rex twitches in sleep, makes that little whimper, perhaps he’s dreaming we are still back in West Hampstead or maybe he’s forgotten all about Pie Man now, maybe he’s just dreaming of chasing rabbits in a field where the grass doesn’t smell of car exhaust.

  My arm aches, the ice pack is dripping cold lines of water. I lean over the railings and watch the girl disappear round the corner.

  I can hear the TV and Stephen’s silence down the corridor. I can smell the cold coffee in front of me and I look down at the table and a blue and silver plastic pen. Rolling it over between finger and thumb, I read:

  Hotel Danieli Venezia Tel: 00 41 522 6480.

  So he went back. With someone else, and to the hotel he’d wanted in the first place. And I remember the jolt as I smashed a heavy heel on the steps of the Cipriani on 20 July 1990, leaving an open-mouthed porter gaping down at the splintered entrails of gold plastic biro that I had ground into the stone. The only thing I could find that Stephen had touched and that I could break.

  Rex barks so loud I jump. He hurtles into the hall, there is a scrabbling of keys and then a slam. I turn around in the chair to see her staring at Rex who does a U-turn and comes back to sit at my heel.

  ‘You have keys,’ I stare stupidly at the bunch in Zanna’s hand. She opens her mouth, she is also staring at the keys and then she shoves them in her pocket as if the very sight of them is offensive. Stephen has come rushing down the corridor and is standing just out of my view, the third point in this triangle.

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ she says. Stephen steps into view, they are standing shoulder to shoulder in the hall and I seem to be shrinking. Zanna’s mouth takes on monstrous proportions. Stephen is gripped by a speechlessness that I have never previously witnessed. I am reeling backwards, scanning through our shared memories, searching desperately for the moment when I should have known, a point where it must have begun. But each scene self-destructs on contact as if these disconnected fragments never made a whole.

  ‘I mean it, Geri,’ she insists, ‘nothing – happened till after.’

  I make to walk out of the kitchen, through the gauntlet of two, when there is a loud explosion from the living room. ‘IT’S STARTING,’ shouts Stephen, running back down the hall, and we follow the call of the TV to a deep night sky illuminated by green flashes of anti-aircraft fire and an anchorman saying, We have John Holliday live from Baghdad telling us that the aerial bombardment of Baghdad has begun.

  I hear the off-camera thud and John says, We can feel the ground of this hotel shaking as the attack continues. It’s hard to tell, Bernard, but the closer targets appear to be government buildings. Can you see over there in the distance there are rose-red explosions about ten miles out of the city lighting up the sky.

  The camera pans overhead for signs of the
Allied bombers and Bernard’s voice cuts in, I’m curious, John – you can barely hear any planes?

  These are B52s flying at 55,000 feet, am I right?

  Bernard taps his right ear. Sorry to interrupt, John, but we’ve just heard from Tel Aviv that Israeli civilians have been told to open their boxes, that’s those boxes which contain gas masks and syringes of antidotes to nerve gas and a powder to decontaminate chemical weapons that—

  Bernard is interrupted by the excited crackle of John’s voice. It’s like there are a hundred fireflies over to the west there, the blast that came through here a few minutes ago was like the blast you feel at Cape Canaveral when a rocket takes off, a huge wave of hot air came in right through our window here.

  Stephen presses the remote and the scene jumps to a still of a concrete building with a live phone-in from some reporter in Saudi. The Al-Batin hotel is just a stone’s throw from the Kuwaiti border, there’s complete panic here, Trevor. A Saudi engineer just ran past me down the corridor shouting war war war.

  Stephen flicks to BBC where Bush sits in the Oval Office, a flag draped by the window behind him and a smaller one on his desk. The world could wait no longer. We will not fail.

  He jabs impatiently and Bernard returns. He is nodding vigorously at some army guy trapped in a video screen with two and a half rows of medals pinned across his chest. Make no mistake about it, this is serious hardware. We’re talking F–16 Fighting Falcons, F–4G Wild Weasels, A–10 Thunderbolts, probably some F–15 Eagles and of course your F–117A Stealth bombers. That’s on top of the B52s with twelve cruise missiles and eight short-range missiles apiece.