Serious Sweet

by A. L. Kennedy

  Why not be straightforward?

  But she wasn’t in a bleak mood today. In conversation, she might – it was true – have said, ‘I will meet you under the Spinywank – right beside the station.’ But she’d only have meant it in fun. She might even have thought it, but kept quiet. She would have been able to remember that some people don’t appreciate terms like wank and so she would have waited and had a thinkthinkthink, checked to discover if she ought to skip the cheap laugh and be more standard-issue instead. That way you wouldn’t cause offence. Although you might discover later that non-habitual swearers were up for it on some occasions and pleased by bad words from others when the time was right. Hard to tell by looking. You had to test the waters without drowning, slip in gently for a bit of a dip. To be cautious, then, she might have said, ‘I will meet you on Friday, right next to the tower – at London Bridge Station.’ And added no flourishes.

  She’d have been happy, though, however she phrased it. She’d have been happy in any case.

  I will meet you.

  It’s a happy statement.

  It’s a good promise.

  And it had joined her birthday as a pleasant thing to bear in mind.

  It’s my birthday.

  This is her first birthday.

  She is forty-five years old and having her first birthday.

  This has been her first birthday for quite a while, in fact, longer than average, to be honest.

  I’m spinning it out. Just try and stop me. You can’t. Bet you can’t. This birthday is all mine.

  She’s made it as far as her continuing first birthday and is trotting further on. This is an excellent thought.

  She has a collection of premium-quality thoughts which she likes to count through. She has scenes and moments she remembers deliberately. This is her equivalent of maybe passing warm pebbles from hand to hand, smooth and reliable, or her version of the rosary, her misbaha, her mala, her komboloi, her worry beads – everyone worries and why not have beads? She counted out invisible fragments and wished they were more obvious, better at saying to other people, Just leave me alone for a minute, because I am busy with wanting to feel all right.

  There’s no fault in wanting that.

  There’s no harm in milking your birthday. Even if it did happen more than a week ago – so what?

  My name is Meg. It’s my fucking birthday.

  She feels that she’s justified.

  How often, after all, do you have your first birthday? Usually not more than once.

  Fine, OK – it wasn’t a birthday, it was an anniversary.

  My name is Margaret Williams, Meg Williams. My name is Meg and it is my anniversary. One year.

  But birthday was a better word for it, because telling yourself first birthday could remind you of when you were a kind of celebrity at rock-star level, but too young to enjoy it. When you got born you were immediately good news. When anyone saw you they smiled. They gave you stuff. They wanted to hold you and protect you and be kind. You could dress like a mental patient and not utter a sensible word, but that was OK, that was cool, that pleased people and they purely wanted to know more about you and find out your needs. If you messed up then somebody else washed away your problem and you only had to be and that was enough to satisfy. You being you was a bloody treat for anyone who caught it.

  One is the age of automatic celebrity.

  Who wouldn’t want a share of that?

  One is spotless and has no baggage and can do no harm. It has only the ghosts of things to come – each one of them carrying a happy promise.

  She didn’t, in the usual way of things, enjoy thinking of the future – the future had an unmanageable shape.

  But when you were one, you had this big, noticeable, smiling future – it was right there for you, straight ahead and held to be inviting. You had promise and it wasn’t meant to disappear, not until you were older. You were a promise. To others as much as to yourself.

  A nudge of emotion started to seethe up from her feet and she hoped that the early dog walkers didn’t come too near and notice her slightly crying. The Hill was a chatty area, you might not get away with tears – you’d have to protect yourself against enquiries.

  Really, she ought to head home and get warmed and out of her pyjamas. Outings undertaken with wellingtons and a coat over pyjamas were viewed as an acceptable morning practice in many households around here. The Hill didn’t judge. Car jaunts of an evening could use the same dress code. If you had a car. She didn’t any more. And there was work soon and something else before and she had to get ready in a number of ways and the bus schedules had become mainly theoretical of late, which meant she had to be responsible and set aside more time for journeys. She should shower and make ready and chase straight off to be where she should and then onwards to do her job and serve a purpose.

  This was another good thing to have in mind: she was employed and her employers found her useful and wanted her to keep appearing as agreed and paid her and provided a workforce kettle and mugs – free to all staff – and encouraged community-building traditions, like the rota that meant each last Friday in the month someone had to bring cake.

  It occurred to her that the pressure of her approaching turn as a bringer of cake was OK.

  But, then again, it was a pressure.

  When a cake failed it ruined the mood for the whole of the office and finished the month sadly. Success in the cake area was therefore important.

  She’d have to buy one, because she couldn’t bake, not reliably. Baking the cake, anyway, would invite hysteria. If it was a dreadful cake from a shop, you could blame the shop. Your own dreadful cake – people have to be polite about it, but they don’t want it and you being around in the aftermath of your rotten cake provision means that co-workers have to sneak off and ditch their slices. Then you’ll end up catching sight of binned cake wrapped in paper towels, but still obvious, or cake troubling pigeons on the window sills, or anywhere really, it would depend on how resourceful your co-workers at GFH were, and the more resourceful they were, the more energy they’d have to waste in jettisoning your disaster which was your fault and the entire mess would be so deeply humiliating that it didn’t bear considering.

  So she shouldn’t consider it.

  She should acknowledge instead that it wasn’t a big deal and she was being melodramatic.

  Nevertheless, she’d been testing shop cakes once a week to be sure she’d avoid catastrophe. How good they were depended quite depressingly upon price. She wanted a relatively cheap cake. She also wanted a cake that felt innocent and as if some experienced relative’s hands had formed and finished it – plain but delicious and heartfelt. She wanted to give people something kind and simple.

  That wasn’t available.

  The cheap cake was horrible. The expensive cake tasted of greed – of greedy bakers.

  She couldn’t win.

  Who knew cake was such a bastard?

  It wasn’t the major issues that tripped you up – glorious suffering and mayhem were oddly easy to discuss. You could similarly try not to be embarrassed or pursued by your very many inadequacies. But ridiculous, obsessive anxiety about virtually nothing: that was shameful and so you didn’t mention it and so it festered.

  I am letting myself be harassed by eggs, butter, sugar and flour.

  She should buy chocolate for Gartcosh Farm Home. Chocolate cake.

  Chocolate always worked.

  A cake could be nasty, commercial, impersonal, slightly toxic – if it was chocolate, it worked anyway. This was some kind of rule.

  Foolproof.

  Perhaps.

  You couldn’t be absolutely sure, because maybe it would be possible to make the people at GFH finally tired of chocolate. It was a bit of an open goal when it came to providing treats and so it occurred very often.

  She shouldn’t be boring.

  She shouldn’t trash a path to joy for everybody.

  She shouldn’t ruin chocolate for everyon
e forever.

  Jesus, this was hard.

  Cake was hard.

  No.

  She was out of the park now and on her way back to the flat – her strides fast with patisserie-related tension.

  No. This is crazy.

  She paused at the kerb, as if being cautious about suddenly appearing traffic, although no sign of any such thing was even distantly approaching.

  I cannot be bullied by cake. Not even real cake – by theoretical cake.

  She sniffed, frowned, stepped into the empty road.

  What I should do is get a chocolate and another one …

  No.

  NoChristfuckshitforshittingfuckssake.

  I mean, really.

  What she should do was not think about it.

  Starting now.

  Not think about chocolate cake without traces of nuts.

  And no gluten.

  And no alcohol.

  Organic chocolate.

  Chocolate that helped starving villages and put orphans into schools, that built the schools, that saved lives and nourished communities and made strong women sing and wise men love them.

  No one could argue with that.

  Although there was no need to fuss or think about this. Not about cake.

  It was just a fucking cake.

  Which should be chocolate.

  Why the hell were they all so demanding?

  Making people bring cake. Which sadist thought of that?

  Not that it wasn’t a good idea.

  It was nobody’s fault but her own that the prospect of cake provision could burrow a hole through her head within seconds and let all the sense drop out, have her imagining accidents: choking, allergies and sickness, these swiftly followed by her sacking and destitution, homelessness, begging and death.

  Just a cake.

  Just the threat of a cake.

  So don’t think about it.

  She should move herself forward to something else.

  She should pick one of her shiniest, best things. Pick a warm thought, a true one.

  I will meet you.

  She opened her gate, walked up the path to her front door and undertook to ensure that while she waited for the doubtful bus and then something unpleasant beyond it and then work – she did like her work – she could have that promise, kept safe.

  I will meet you.

  Fear or no fear, the thought was with her – all the way in.

  I will meet you.

  It was so dangerous with hope that she’d only consider it in little rushes, for fear of worrying and pulling it apart. For fear of fear and the way that her fear would breed further fear. One plus one equals more.

  I will meet you.

  But it was with her, anyway.

  My name is Meg and I’ve passed my one-year anniversary and I have this with me.

  I will meet you.

  Meg could feel it was almost certain that if somebody parted her ribs and looked inside, there would be a light to find because of this. Because of all this.

  It was with her.

  Here it is.

  A middle-aged woman sits beside the window in a café. Behind her there is a chaos of children and parents – some kind of community group outing. Mothers and fathers chat tiredly around one large accumulation of tables while their charges ramp and squeal. Beyond the window there is weather: grey horizontals of rain and battered leaves being tormented along gutters. The park across the way is a riot of lashing and tearing green. Only the woman is still. She stares through the glass with a kind of absence, a type of seriousness, which keeps the children from approaching her, even though they are unstoppable everywhere else.

  The woman sips from a mug of something and turns back to the sheets of white paper on her table – these three squarish sheets with black handwriting across them. She studies them and, from her expression, it’s impossible to tell if they are keeping her attention because they are wonderful, or dreadful.

  Then she smiles.

  Jon had vomited quietly, neatly, into Valerie’s downstairs toilet, flushed his evidence away and then ascended in search of clothes.

  Throwing up had been calming, although weirdly impersonal.

  On my back and the back of my shirt – right through my shirt – I’m clammy.

  I need to change completely.

  Something with which Val would happily, delightedly agree.

  Jon had padded up to the second floor and barely begun combing through Val’s subsidiary wardrobe in the Rose Room – her term, not mine: bloody Rose Room, bloody ridiculous – when his phone rang. Predictably, he flinched in response.

  Even though it’s not her.

  Even though she would anticipate and relish my being curious – it would please and not disturb her – and she no longer has the right to shout at me.

  How lovely. Now that I think of it. This lack of shouting.

  At present, Valerie was allegedly at or near what she’d described as a villa in the Bahamas, enjoying the exotic wildlife of the Inagua National Park. That’s what he’d been told.

  She hates wildlife. Presumably whoever she is with has a thing for sandflies and flamingos. Won’t last.

  Although perhaps her current escort has – in fact – a thing for shouting. People do. People do flock towards all kinds of harm, shouting included.

  Or else if the damage is something they haven’t chosen, they’ll choose to own it, as if that might help. That could have multiple implications for any relationship – a person might end up trusting cruelty, marrying cruelty, craving it. And, bearing this in mind, any sensible human being might actually have doubts should any other human being greet him with apparently consistent warmth. That initial human being – the first human being – who has grown into doubts might think to himself, Yes, but am I wonderful? Really? Or am I a new knife she’s chosen to run her wrists across? Is that what she intends for me? Am I a weapon? I really would rather not …

  And – as someone who might myself be fond of predictable hurts – wouldn’t I be better off and happier with someone harsh?

  And wouldn’t this produce a state of permanent emotional incarceration?

  Which is what Valerie would highlight as an example of morbid thinking.

  His phone stopped ringing but retained an air of business left undone.

  Then again, why did Valerie choose me, if not as a mortification, a morbid pleasure? I was a pain she could love to find intolerable.

  He rubbed his face, as though rearranging the outside of his head might tousle his brain and leave him refreshed. Then he wondered if he’d washed his hands enough after trying to deal with his trousers.

  Shit.

  In every sense.

  His phone began again.

  And shit.

  And this is not the bloody Rose Room, it’s the Spare Room with Foolishly Expensive Hand-Blocked Wallpaper in a Relatively Vile Pink. But that would take too long to say. I do see her point. She isn’t a woman to waste words.

  You don’t need a lot of words in a shout, they would spoil the effect.

  Unless you’re tirading. She sometimes branched out beyond simple yells and screaming – embraced the tirade.

  I do not often shout.

  I do not tirade. Not ever.

  I am lots of nots.

  And, since Valerie, what do they see – women – when they look at me?

  Exactly the correct amount of harm?

  An opportunity for shouting.

  Or is it me that has a thing for shouting?

  In any case, shouting from Valerie wouldn’t be at me, not these days. Not now. Not at me, why at me?

  The phone tickled and asked in his jacket pocket – knowing, smug. In the end, they both knew that he’d have to respond.

  But it won’t be her.

  Why still anticipate it? I won’t even be crossing her mind – not if she’s … She won’t be awake. Or if she is, one might say that her wakefulness would be for the usual reasons and theref
ore wouldn’t make her think of me.

  Nevertheless, he did mainly expect to see her name on his caller display when he checked it.

  Nope. Sansom.

  He didn’t want to speak to Sansom. Although a call this early would indicate a level of urgency to which Jon should respond, he didn’t wish to. He wasn’t in the mood.

  And never mind early phone calls – vis-a-vis the time it would take to get himself from here into the office, it wasn’t half early enough. It was past seven. He truly did have to get on and step lively.

  It was only that liveliness seemed beyond him.

  Nope, Sansom.

  The phone continued to pester as he forced it down into his pocket again, despite its complaints. Then it stilled.

  Like drowning a puppy.

  He smiled and went back to fumbling Val’s coat hangers as if he were a burglar.

  Less a burglar and more a pervert.

  Since his trousers were spoiled with both bird shit and inexpert rubbing at bird shit and his shirt was unpalatable, Jon really did need something fresh he could wear.

  He was sure that he’d left some clothes here. A few things. She might well have given them away, though. She might well have burned them in the Aga, shredded them, had them fired into outer space, who could predict … She could on occasion possess a magnificent spite. Really. He wasn’t being unpleasant about that – her imagination was genuinely impressive in many areas.

  Mine has been trained to be no longer there. In many areas.

  Up to a point.

  So today I can make a disinterested search of Val’s house without distraction …

  She’d be disappointed if I didn’t search.

  The hangers were heavy with her winter coats, several of her pensioned-off evening dresses and winter outfits he recalled and – yes – a couple of men’s suits.

  Neither of them was his.

  A couple of men’s suits. The suits, in fact, of a couple of men. That blue should be illegal and that one looks like it was issued by a workhouse – faux Edwardian labourer. Spare me. His week’s spend on moustache wax and beard-care products would be more than a labourer earned in a year. And, yes – he will have a moustache and, yes, he will wax it. Twirled ends, I bet.

  And there were shirts. Four … no, five shirts. Ghastly shirts and ghastly in two different ways. He surmised that numbers one to three belonged to the blue suit, which belonged to a moron who thought that deep cutaway collars could be worn in civilised society – youngish, probably works in finance, how fat does he anticipate having to make his tie knot …? What would that prove? Dear me … And then there were these two unaccountable efforts from yet another man: not-bad point collars, but silk and in colours and oppressive patterns which strongly suggested a last dash for sex before taking the friends of one’s twenty-something daughter out for tea becomes an acceptable way to express one’s desolation. Oh dear again. It’s always sad to see a past mistress finally losing her form.