Thomas and Mary

by Tim Parks

  Surely he could tell, though, I put it to Thomas, couldn’t he, a man with his experience?

  Thomas shook his head. Sylvia was responsive, he said, but not in the ordinary way. She hardly seemed to be seeking pleasure, or even deliberately giving it. Just doing things, instinctively.

  Thomas and I looked at each over our beers. He had stumbled on an experience whereof he could not even begin to speak. He could only speak of not being able to speak of it.

  Thomas began to cry off our tennis evenings now, which came as something of a relief, frankly, although, since I knew from his wife that he still told her that he was going to play tennis, and to play with me, I could not help being curious. Then, one night he didn’t go home.

  ‘I’ve understood,’ he said, next time we played. ‘I’ve got it.’

  He seemed very pleased with himself, though on the court he had been thoroughly beaten. In fact he made so little effort I had the impression he was only playing to arrive at the beers afterwards.

  It had to do with their cooking together, he said. Badly, if the truth be told. And with their dancing together in her front room, clumsily. It had to do with her laughter and her utter uninterest, not in sex, but in any talking about sex, any urgency surrounding sex.

  ‘So does she come or not?’ I asked abruptly. ‘Or give that impression?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t even know if she gives the impression?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you make love. Presumably there is some kind of climax, or anticlimax, a signal that it’s time to wind down. You must sense where she’s up to?’

  ‘I always come,’ he said. ‘Then it ends.’

  ‘You haven’t told me anything about her body: what she gets up to, what you get up to?’

  ‘Actually,’ Thomas confessed, ‘last time I went over there it ended up we didn’t make love. We talked late and fell asleep.’

  ‘Sounds to me,’ I told him, ‘like she doesn’t come at all and doesn’t care, and you like her because she saves you the effort and doesn’t worry about it.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he protested. ‘When we make love, she signals something … But not … not …’

  I watched him.

  ‘It’s as if she came from a different planet.’

  ‘Well …’ I waited.

  ‘Or as if … as if what I’d been driving at, these past couple of years, wasn’t actually sex at all but some other … some thing that, that … well, that was hiding, or hidden.’

  I was getting bored with this. ‘Something that you can’t describe?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Behind sex.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Unnameable and ineffable, I suppose.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘God.’ I shook my head.

  ‘I’ve decided to leave home,’ he added gravely.

  ‘About time,’ I told him.

  BIVOUAC

  This flat is much larger than a bivouac, but that’s how I think of it, a small, flimsy refuge exposed to every inclemency. For sure, it’s not a base camp. But then, home was hardly base camp either. I must stop calling it home. The truth is I often think of my progress in terms of an extended mountaineering metaphor, although I know nothing of mountaineering and am afraid of heights. I’m not making any progress at all.

  There are three main rooms. You walk into a sitting room with kitchenette opposite and one large window. Through the only other door, there is a long narrow old-fashioned bathroom to the right and a medium-sized bedroom straight ahead. That’s it. I’m bivouacked, hunkered down. Not on Everest or the Eiger’s cruel North Face. Nothing so grand. Possibly it’s more like Dartmoor, the barren landscape beyond the prison walls. In any event, the wind is wild. Every morning it’s a miracle to find myself waking safe and sound in storm-tossed sheets.

  What would progress mean? A bivouac is something you pack on your back and carry onwards day by day, upwards ever upwards. I have learned how to cook in this flat. The oven is wedged in a corner with the sink on one side and a work surface on the other. Through the window come sounds of dogs and children. The custodian sweeps the paving round the front door with a nylon broom that makes sharp, rhythmic scraping sounds. It was progress when I stopped feeling that she was sweeping my exposed nerves. But I haven’t yet learned to deal with the deaf couple who shout over the television in the next flat. Unless perhaps it’s progress that my attention can attach itself to these minor irritations. Perhaps they are actually a source of relief. Going nowhere, I’m obsessed with the idea of progress.

  For example, from cheese on toast to omelette. From omelette to lentil soup. Various soups. From various lentil soups to curries and even risottos. These are no small achievements for a man in his late fifties. It is no small achievement for a man in his late fifties bivouacked in a small suburban flat to learn to shop for a quiche Lorraine. With mushrooms and leeks. Even more, to eat whatever comes out of the oven, in peace, listening to a BBC arts programme on his laptop. Even more, to wash the dishes before going to bed, to drink camomile tea rather than whisky. To go to sleep sober is a very considerable achievement.

  But hardly progress. More like the bivouac’s holding up. I’m still here.

  When mountaineers climb a mountain, they reach the summit, take photos of themselves, plant a pole perhaps, then return to wherever they set out from, enriched by hardships that allow them to enjoy routine again. The whole point of my being in this flat is not to go back to where I set out from. Nor is there any summit for me to reach and plant a pole on. The mountaineering analogy is completely inappropriate. But it was never an intellectual construct. It’s a feeling. I feel I’m perched halfway up a mountain beyond immediate rescue in miserable weather conditions. Presumably I hoped I was heading somewhere else but ended up in this bivouac on a windswept mountainside.

  Actually the flat is on the first floor over the entrance of a nondescript block, built, I would imagine, in the mid-’60s, though there is no date or founding stone anywhere. This is not a building that thinks of its place in history. The thing I immediately liked about it, when the landlord showed me in, was the parquet flooring. It must have been part of a renovation job in the late ’90s. They used a dark, rich reddish wood that gives the off-white room a quiet warmth. I do believe this dark wood and the warmth and comfort it gives me are what has spared my bivouac from being blown away.

  I couldn’t care less about loneliness. I have my work. Any number of people rely on my expertise. Sometimes in the middle of the night I get up and venture out. Perhaps I imagine I’m beginning the final ascent. Or ready to climb down, come down from my mountainside. It’s not pitch-dark, but the world is indistinct, as if shadows were being blown about, imposing shapes that might be buildings or mountain slopes, except they shift and shrink and grow. Am I in the clouds? There’s a crash of rushing water. I have no idea which way to turn. It’s this that frightens me. Up and down are words I don’t understand. Forward and back mean nothing. Everything shifts with a wild and violent purposelessness. Where am I to go? The water booms too loudly for me to imagine swimming in its flow.

  Later I get up, pee, make myself another camomile tea and sit on the sofa in the dark. It’s a small, formless sofa which looks nicer since I hid its grit-grey upholstery beneath a bright blue cover. Finding a shopping centre, then choosing and fitting this cover was definitely a sign of progress. I sit on the sofa in the early hours with a little street light creeping through the curtains, sip camomile and stare at the parquet. I find if I manage to focus all my attention on the slightly different shades of the parallel strips of wood, the scratches, the different levels of polish, the little stains and so on, then this calms my mind. If I can concentrate on the parquet floor, its dust and crumbs, in the low dawn light, for the whole time it takes to drink a mug of hot camomile, if I can become, as it were, and for this very brief time, one with the warm wood, with this strange touch of gentility in an otherwise
humdrum flat, bivouacked on a windswept ledge, then I will be able to go to bed again and perhaps even sleep an hour until my workday begins.

  I had just pulled the covers over my head when the phone trilled. I had forgotten to turn it off. It was in the sitting room of my bivouac. There is only one person who could be phoning at this hour. So there was no reason to get up to answer the phone, since the one person, who could be calling was the one person I had no intention of talking to. For the time being. I may talk to her one day, I won’t say never, but I am not planning to talk to her now.

  All the same I got up – it was towards five – and went into the sitting room. I should have mentioned that in the middle of the sitting room there is a rectangular glass table on which I eat, and sometimes work. The phone was lying on the table among a great deal of other clutter, trilling and vibrating harshly against the glass. The display glowed. The phone trembled a little and moved with its pathetic vibrations, like something alive. With the same old feeling of trepidation I crossed the parquet floor and came up close. Even though I was reading upside down, the letters on the display, giving the name of the caller, were clear enough. JUST DON’T, they said. The phone trilled. JUST DON’T. I’m surprised sometimes how long the phone companies allow a phone to go on trilling when it’s obvious that it’s not going to be answered.

  Maybe it’s not obvious.

  The phone throbs on the table. If I pick it up, the shapeless world of swirling cloud and rushing water will rearrange itself in a familiar landscape complete with high-security gaol. The bivouac will be a businessman’s urban pied-à-terre, forty-one easily travelled miles from home base. If I pick it up, every object will regain its name and meaning; up will be up and down will be down. Time and history will be themselves.

  The phone pulses on the glass surface. I watch it, relishing a moment of weakness. Through the table I can see where the parquet has been scuffed by my feet when I sit eating my cheese on toast or, more recently, risotto, alone, listening to BBC arts programmes. I like eating alone.

  The phone throbs and glows. JUST DON’T. I let my eyes focus beyond it on the warm parquet and wait and wait and wait until at last it is still.

  That was the wildest night I spent in my bivouac. Some minutes later the phone trilled again. I hadn’t turned it off. There was the clatter of two hard surfaces cursed into togetherness by gravity, fighting to be apart. Again I came to look at it. Again I saw the old command. JUST DON’T. Responding then to I don’t know what impulse, I crouched and stretched myself face down in my underwear under the table on the warm parquet with the pulsing phone now amplified above my head. The way someone might choose a point of precarious safety to expose himself to the wind, to listen for hours to a wicked wind, to feel its force and bitterness, to test himself to the limit. This bivouac, I thought, does not seem to have been built of the strongest materials. I would not use it on a serious climb.

  JUST DON’T.

  I didn’t. Not this time. Or the next, or the next. Nor will I, I thought. I didn’t and didn’t and didn’t again. I haven’t and I won’t. Is this progress? Maybe. The phone is still rattling above my head. The parquet is gritty with crumbs against my bare chest. I should vacuum my bivouac more often. Above my head the phone buzzes on and on like a noisy insect at the end of a long dry season.

  VESPA

  Mark parked his Vespa beside three others outside Yasmin’s school where it would be safe. Yasmin herself hadn’t gone to school, so they had to meet elsewhere. The day was dull and drizzly and Mark had got damp riding into town. He felt a little uncomfortable, his jeans were spotted with mud, but his fingers were warm in nice new gloves. He loved his Vespa. He packed his helmet under the seat and, led by a series of text messages, took the bus three stops to Elmsley Street where Yasmin said they could make love in an empty house; there was a way in through the garden, she said. She had been there before.

  They’d been making love a lot recently. Yasmin was fantastically exotic and experienced. After months of misery life was cheering up. But when he got to Elmsley Street it turned out they’d first have to climb the garden wall then go in through a broken window in full view of passers-by. Mark refused. What was the point of getting caught breaking into a house when they could make love at his parents’ at the weekend? In comfort.

  ‘Remember, my mother’s going away,’ he told his girlfriend.

  They sat in a coffee shop on Cote Street, but Yasmin couldn’t smoke inside, and even outside on the seats under the awning she wasn’t sure she dared smoke her dope, which she could have done if they had gone to the empty house. She didn’t mean to criticise, though, she said. Her parents had kept her home four Saturday nights in a row over poor school results, so she understood worries about getting caught.

  They held hands and fiddled with each other’s rings. They were in love and had been officially engaged for three months on Facebook. Yasmin wore old woollen gloves she had scissored off at the knuckles so she could roll tobacco without removing them. Her fingernails were brown and bitten. Mark loved to watch the fumes curling lazily from her parted lips. She was six months younger than him, but it somehow felt like she was much older.

  When school ended, Yasmin went to her father’s work to get a lift home and Mark met his mother who had come into town to shop. They nosed into three or four places on the High Street and eventually Mark’s mother bought Mark a new sweater. It was a deep mauve that went well with his dark hair but he was worried it made him seem rather bulky. Mark’s mother didn’t get anything for herself. She seemed distracted. When they drove back to Yasmin’s school the Vespa wasn’t there.

  The school railings were on the outside of the bend on Eastleigh Road with lots of slow traffic in both directions. It was such an exposed place it was hard to imagine how anyone could have dared steal anything. There were now five other bikes and mopeds of one kind or another lined up together, but Mark’s wasn’t amongst them. The rain was falling heavily.

  ‘Are you sure you left it here?’ Mark’s mother asked sharply. They didn’t have an umbrella. Mark was perfectly sure, but his mother was not convinced. ‘Think,’ she said. ‘Try to remember.’ Mark suddenly felt very upset, staring at the five bikes on the pavement in the splashing rain. Without the Vespa he was a prisoner in a remote house in the country. Now his mother was going away there would be no more lifts in the car. He would never get Yasmin home without the Vespa.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t whine,’ his mother scolded. ‘Think of the moment you got off the bike and locked up your helmet. Where were you?’

  ‘I know I left it here!’ Mark’s voice quavered. ‘Where else would I leave it when I come to meet Yasmin?’

  ‘Call her,’ his mother said. ‘Just to check.’

  Mark refused, but his mother said she wouldn’t take the problem seriously until he did. It was the most ordinary thing in the world to forget where you had parked a car or locked up a bike. She had once spent an hour at the Three Lilies Centre trying to find the Fiesta.

  Because you were unhappy, Mark thought. Because you were thinking about Dad.

  Mark made the call and Yasmin laughed. ‘The lads must have taken it,’ she chuckled. There was a band at school, she said, who took bikes for joyrides and to steal parts. ‘Go and look behind the school, maybe they’ve dumped it there.’ Mark was upset; Yasmin seemed more amused than anything else. She didn’t understand how important the scooter was for them. Mark’s mother was making signs to say she wanted to speak to the girl, but Mark ended the call. He hadn’t asked Yasmin point blank if she remembered him leaving the Vespa outside the school and the last thing he wanted was for his mother to ask her and discover she hadn’t been at school. ‘She knows I left it here,’ he said, ‘otherwise she wouldn’t say to go and look round the back, would she?’

  At this point his mother saw someone she knew coming out of the school, a woman who walked her dog in the park where she walked hers. They began to laugh and talk together and the w
oman, who turned out to be a geography teacher, said there were so many problems at the school because of the backgrounds the kids came from and how many were immigrants and it was perfectly possible Mark’s Vespa had been stolen. This was probably the worst place he could have parked it, she thought. Mark’s mother seemed almost too jolly and talkative. It was embarrassing. The boy started off on his own to walk round the back of the school. Turning the second corner which led him into waste ground used as a car park, the first thing he saw was his Vespa.

  He felt a strong rush of joy at the sight of it. It was a sharp bright red, with white seat and wheels and a lovely streamlined shape. He felt in his pocket for his keys to get his helmet from the back. The seat would need wiping too. Then he saw the motor was gone.

  It took him three or four seconds to grasp this. First he sensed the bike looked different: thinner and lighter. Odd. Then he realised the motor was missing. Between the back wheel and the seat there was an empty space. He wanted to sit down on the wet ground and cry. Now the Vespa wasn’t just missing, it was dead.

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ Mark’s mother said. ‘For heaven’s sake!’ They would have to go to the police. The scooter had cost more than £2,000 only six months ago. They must report the crime, then go to the insurance people and make a claim. ‘These vandals are a disgrace,’ she said. But it was typical of the kind of people who lived in this part of town.

  Mark texted Yasmin: ‘It’s there but they’ve taken the motor.’ She texted back: ‘Awesome!’ Mark felt sick. Then Mark’s mother said they should remove the licence plates in case they needed to be handed in some time. Both of them were getting soaked now. Mark’s mother went back round the school to fetch the Fiesta which had some tools in it and Mark tore a nail trying to pull off one of the wet plates which had jammed against the mudguard. The worst thing though was the feeling in his head that life would never be the same. His pretty Vespa had been disembowelled.