Eight Rooms

by Various

  “Hello Anna,” I said.

  She turned and held her palm to her cleavage, as if shocked. “You made me jump,” she whispered. Straight away, the curve of her lips as she spoke, the movement of her hair as her head turned made this mist wrap around me, this singular emotion rise up. I stood up and put my arms around her body, which felt slightly weak. I kissed her cheek. “How is the piece coming on?” she asked, her eyes looking just past me.

  “Fine,” I whispered. “I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you. Of course,” she said steadily into my face. She opened her cigarette case and, after a shaking flash of fingers, she started calmly inhaling the cascade of smoke. “Can I see?”

  I pushed the sheaf of papers towards her, as ever giving the impression of slight anger that she hadn’t greeted me more warmly. The cigarette in one hand, her eyes passed over the words in flickers. “This is very good,” she said. “Well? Come here then.”

  I sat on the edge of the table and she pouted, wrapping her hands around my head. Her fingers reached through my hair, and she kissed me delicately on the lips. “You are so talented,” she whispered, among the smoke as she picked up a half-filled glass of whisky. As if a thought had suddenly occurred to her as she stood up and moved over to the laptop. A cold chill rushed through me as I realised that covering the screen to Tiffany’s room was just one sheet of paper and, with a quick glance over her shoulder, I realised that the screen was still on, projecting through the white sheet, making it translucent and green with its glow. After the argument with Tiffany I had turned it back on, something I usually never did anywhere around the time Anna could come home. But on this occasion I had, just once, to study Tiffany’s reactions to our argument and I had somehow forgotten to turn it off.

  Now Anna’s body was moving, her hand was moving so close to unsettling the papers that at once I snatched it and placed it hard on my hip. “You know, I think you smell sexy when you smoke,” I croaked.

  With one finger she peeled some skin from her lip, her thigh creeping closer to unsettling the page. I felt the same charge I always felt being close to her body as I placed one hand on her thigh, just a few inches above the hemline of her skirt. Suddenly I kissed her lips deeply, prising them open and she moaned slightly, kissing me back. I searched desperately for that opened feeling she used to give when I kissed her and I found traces of it, buried somewhere in her mouth when suddenly her lips withdrew.

  “What’s this?”

  “What’s what?’ My answer was too quick. It was only a second until she had swept the page away and there was the screen of the camera, its unflinching portrayal of Tiffany’s empty room bathed in a cheap green light looking up at us.

  She stood up, her stiletto’s snapping onto the floorboards. “What the hell is this?” She looked at me, her eyebrows creased in anger. I had a horrible feeling that the look would never leave her face again. “What. Are. You doing?” she hissed.

  I looked outside. I realised no car had stopped outside tonight.

  “My mind has stayed yours,” I replied.

  There was a pause as the implications of these words sank in. Her head turned to one side.

  “We’re not getting into this again.” She looked straight at me, her lips curled slightly. “Have you been watching Tiffany getting dressed? Am I just not enough?”

  There was a pause, and her voice came back. Louder this time, in a way that sent a chill through me. “Am I too old?”

  “Anna, I’ve done nothing wrong. We agreed that our minds would be kept for each other, only wanting each other, and I haven’t broken that. I haven’t broken the pact.”

  “And your body? Under my roof?”

  “It’s my roof,” I shouted, snapping to my feet.

  “Under your roof then?” She flung the words out, more an accusation than a question. “And what exactly have you been doing with your body under your roof?”

  There was an endless pause.

  “It was only ever to keep The Visitors away.”

  She waited. “Not this again. Don’t you dare bring this up again. I never even knew if that conversation was real. You can’t be serious.”

  “If I ever slept with Tiffany it was only so that I could deal with The Visitors in this house. With the people who have been intimate in my rooms.” I tore at my hair. “It was only ever so that I could deal with what has happened under this roof.”

  “We agreed,” she said hoarsely, stabbing the cigarette at me. “We agreed that what happened with our bodies was inevitable. That infidelity with our bodies was okay. But that our minds. That our minds would only ever be kept for each other. You’ve used your mind. You’ve planted a camera, you’ve seduced her, you’ve kept all this behind my back. None of this was agreed. If there was any pact, you have broken it. You’ve completely destroyed it.”

  I felt the ghosts ready to charge back over me. I suddenly had a terrible fear that some violent impulse was about to overwhelm me. I wanted that mist back; I wanted its comfort to enshroud me so badly. I wanted Anna’s brow to uncrease and kiss me in a way that told me that her body was open for me, that welcomed me into her soul again. I didn’t want to have to control; I wanted to love, purely and simply, and for there to be no Visitors – nothing but us.

  The dizziness was rising now, so strong that I felt it would push me over.

  “Anna, please. I have had to deal with your Key Players. I have had to deal with your Visitors.”

  “Never in this house. If you have ever been haunted by ghosts those ghosts have never lived in this house; it’s only ever happened outside. I would never allow it!” She screamed the last sentence, suddenly slamming down the glass tumbler, sending thick shards of glass into the air. I knew, with the awful feeling of a man losing something that he loves, something that he will ruminate over for endless hours to come, that I was watching my life as a man watches a car crash. With no control. Completely separated from any possibility of affecting how events could unfold.

  “I have had to deal with The Key Players and I have managed it, I have buried them. I only had The Visitors to deal with, and I was so close,” I answered.

  “The Key Players, as you always call them, are my clients. They are how I make my money and how I keep the clothes on my back while you spend years over a few sentences for some academic to read. Those clients are the money that keeps this roof over my head. And if I am ever too tired to make love to you like I do to them, then perhaps that is because I know I have to keep the money coming in to fuel your obsession.”

  “You could have got a job.”

  “Not to raise the money we need to keep this luxury; it would never do that. Either you’d have to change or I’d have to do that. And I am hardly a common whore; it is a couple of very rich Key Players, not even very often, who keep this roof over our heads. You know that.”

  “But you’re mine. I can be completely poverty stricken and be happy as long as I just have your body to myself. You always agreed that my body would be prioritised over other men’s and there’s no way that has happened. That was what The Formula was for, to work out what we needed from other people and what we needed to save for each other.”

  “I want this life. I always said I wanted this life, and it has to be earned. That is part of the reason I loved you, and I did it for you and for us. This life has to be bought, it doesn’t come free, and it takes sacrifices.” She paused for breath, her once beautiful face smouldering in the flames of recriminations held inside for so long. “You agreed that you would change with me, that we would change together, but if you can’t understand why your body is not a priority to me all of the time, then you have not changed,” she shouted.

  “Certain things can change. But we agreed that certain things would be mine…”

  “Not this again. Not this strange act that you seem to think ties us together. Is that what all this is about? This one thing that you know another man could never get from me? The one thing that it is unlik
ely another woman would ever do for you?” She stopped, turned the side of her head. “This is where this obsession stems from, isn’t it? This lust to somehow control everyone who enters my life? Because you know only I would do that thing for you, that thing that somehow makes me yours. That you can’t afford to lose. Because you’ll never get it again.”

  “It’s just a way of making myself feel that I can’t be replaced.”

  “It’s pathetic.”

  “No. You’re just focusing on this to find ways out, Anna, when all of this stems from you. You being unable to make your lover feel unique. You and your other men, who we could remove so easily.”

  There was an endless pause as the words hung in the air. In a way that only a lover can, I saw familiar arguments formulate behind her eyes.

  “Even if I did give them up. And there were no more Key Players. And we both somehow found a way to have no more Visitors in our lives; you would never be able to live with the ghosts of my previous lovers. Of men who have loved me before you were even in my life. That is what makes you different. It is them that fester in this room and plague you, just as much as anything in the present.”

  “It isn’t. It is the constant reminder of them by the acts that you do every day that makes them a threat. And, anyway, you won’t stop what you’re doing. So we can never know, can we?”

  The next sentence came from her so slowly; it was as if every word was directly aimed at my heart.

  “I only ever loved you for your mind. And now your mind is no longer mine, you are no use to me,” she said.

  I breathed in.

  “You are nothing to me,” she screamed, and then raised the broken tumbler in the air, its jagged edges the last image that I can recall.

  Those events now seem to now exist behind a film. I know that they happened to me, but they seem intangible, unreachable. One of the fallouts of what Anna then did to me is that I find it difficult to sequence events and to logically work out the best actions to be undertaken. I’m not unaware of the irony as it seems that my inability to logically make sense of relationships was what caused this to happen in the first place. My way of looking at the world was a consequence of trying to deal with Anna’s job, to deal with those ghosts that could not leave me alone, and yet my strategy was so flawed that it caused me to end up here.

  Why did I need to think of Visitors, and Key Players, and Formulas? Why could I not accept that someone cannot be my own? It’s also ironic that Anna loved me for my mind, but my mind is so damaged now that I could not even write this myself. It had to be dictated to one of the few people that I trust in the hospital where I live. By one of the people who now complete all of the daily tasks that I used to complete myself, tasks that I used to take for granted.

  When I now struggle to make sense of the world, I know I have time to reflect on what happened and to make sense of it. In the past I was guilty of not being sensual about the way I related to the world. I was guilty of analysing my private life to the point that I made it violent and dangerous. Here, left alone to turn over the past and to recreate it, knowing that my thoughts cannot affect how I conduct my life, I can dwell inside realms of my mind that are more sensuous and perfect than the real world could ever offer. You may think that living here, having little interaction with the real world, I am ignorant about real life. That left to dwell upon the endless and often beautiful possibilities of my mind, I live in a state of ignorance. But to be free from the constraints of the real world, to be able to dwell in these realms and to have the agony of choice removed, I finally have the potential to be happy.

  7

  A.J. Kirby

  The buzzer groans in complaint; like me, it never really seems happy when someone comes to the gated entrance of our flats and rings up for us to let them through. Because we’re flat number one, we do get far more visitors than we’re supposed to. We get postmen, suspicious-looking characters dropping off rainforest-buckling packages of takeaway menus, little moustachioed gasmen here to read the meter. We get local kids pressing the buzzer for a prank as they wait for a bus on the main road and we sometimes get wide-boys from the brewery asking that we can move our wheels in order that they can get their lorry in front of the bar downstairs and drop off their expensive beer so it can be watered-down properly.

  Perhaps this dripping water-torture of the city’s miscellaneous have-nots that arrive at our gate all share one thing; perhaps they believe that Flat 1 is the home of the caretaker or something. Perhaps they believe that I have nothing better to do than continuously traipse across our polished-wood floor so that I can offer them my assistance.

  Some of them ask me where they can find the bus-stop which will take them to Newton Mills. I tell them that it’s a bus that they are looking for; bus-stops don’t actually go anywhere. Some of them ask me what time it is; I tell them that it’s time that they should ‘do one.’ And yet, despite my best efforts, they still flock back to press the buzzer for Flat 1. The way that they all stare so expectantly into the pinhole video camera in the door access system convinces me that they truly believe that I am some kind of free information service, like the flat’s own resident Wikipedia.

  City-living, the estate agents called it. I know better now; living-hell, I call it. We’d have been better off living in the suburbs. At least you get a bit of privacy there.

  The buzzer groans again. It’s a low, insistent sound; it can reach right into your dreams and pluck you out of bed with Keira Knightley. It could be a wonder in the world of science; they could use that sound to wake up even the most deeply-slumbering coma patients.

  ‘Can you get that?’ I yell. Considering that we live in a flat which has, at best four rooms – I’d get the Trades Descriptions people in on that supposed ‘box-room’ if I had more time on my hands; I don’t know of any box that would fit in there apart from a match-box – we do spend a lot of time randomly shouting through the walls at each other, hoping that we’ll hear what the other has to say above our creaking cappuccino machine or the mood music that she puts on the Bang and Olufsen.

  No answer. I stand there in front of the cinema-screen sized mirror above the fireplace, hair-sculpting mousse congealing on my fingers and consider whether it is worth another shout. She’s got selective hearing, my missus; she’d bloody-well hear me if I whispered something about her alarm-bell obsessive collection of candles on the decorative display shelf (or mantelpiece as I call it).

  ‘Rachel?’ I scream. ‘The buzzer’s gone. Will you answer it?’

  The buzzer doesn’t bother her like it does me. She can escape from it during the day when she trots off to work. I, on the other hand, weave my wonderful webs on the internet from the comfort of my own home, meaning that I get all the straggling commuters in the morning, the local drunks in the afternoon, and the merry pranksters on their way home from school. I suppose I’ve grown to hate the thing. I’ve even switched it off so as to preserve my peace of mind, but missed supermarket food-order deliveries and random visits from friends which I blissfully ignored put paid for. Rachel wanted it put back on again.

  Another buzz. Finally, she steps into the room and I realise why she hasn’t heard my increasingly frantic calls for assistance. She has been in the shower. She’s still got one towel wrapped around her sleek, dark flowing locks and another covering most of her supple body. I know that this is simply her uniform for crossing from the bathroom to the bedroom. It’s badly designed, Flat 1; in order to get from one to the other, you have to pass in front of the huge windows in the living area. Perhaps the architect has one of the flats in the new block, which overlooks this one, and he quite fancied copping a look at my bird.

  ‘Rach, will you get the buzzer on the way through?’ I ask again, making busy with the sculpting mousse.

  ‘I can’t,’ she says, sneaking past me on tip-toes as though I won’t see her. I know what she’s trying to do. She read that article in Women on Top about drip-drying being better for her body than towel-drying
and she’s mad-keen to get into the bedroom where she can stand around nude and let nature take its course. And fair play to her; she does always make these superhuman efforts to look her best. She’s one of those girls that you see around town that are almost too beautiful for people to pester. Her features are sharp, and she gives off the impression that she’s sharp with her tongue, too. But that won’t help the situation with the buzzer.

  ‘Are you expecting someone?’ I ask, this time the annoyance creeping into my voice.

  ‘Mark! You know what’s happening this weekend; are you being deliberately brick-headed?’

  I stare at her for a moment and weigh up my options. I have absolutely no clue what she is talking about. But to allow her to see any slack-jawed incomprehension on my part would be to invite all hell to break loose. I could just go and answer the buzzer, of course, but I’ve always had that dangerous stubborn streak inside me. If she is so concerned about what we’ve got planned for this weekend then why is she not dressed and ready to go? Why has she not leaped out of the shower, answered the buzzer and allowed me to style my hair in peace?

  She sighs and flounces off into the bedroom. The heavy fire door slams behind her. I’m sure that she didn’t mean to do it, but it is convenient the way that the door does that. Hands still sticky with almost dry mousse, I start to walk over to the video entry system. As if to compound my bad mood, Mr. Snootles chooses to start doing that thing where he trails in and out of my legs, virtually tripping me up with every step. Rachel claims that he does this when he’s hungry, or just to be companiable, but deep down, I know that he does it because he wants me to have a nasty fall and bash my head against the hard wood floor. Then he can have his darling Rachel all to his slippery grey self.

  Mr. Snootles is like Cato in the Pink Panther series; always springing impromptu attacks on me as though checking that I’m on the ball. If I’m late for an appointment, you can guarantee that the sneaky bastard will be there, balancing on top of a door, waiting to attack my newly coiffured hair before I go out. If I’m handling boiling water, he’ll choose that exact moment to wrap his tail around my legs. Rachel never sees any of this. All she ever sees is the way that he curls up on her lap in the evening, that great self-satisfied grin on his chops, while I try to make myself comfortable on the piece of furniture that I refuse to call a pouffe.