She smiled mischievously. ‘I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.’
‘And is this a special occasion?’
‘I think so. Don’t you?’
‘My life is a special occasion, since I met you,’ I said. It sounded terribly pretentious, but I felt it with all sincerity.
The only drinking vessels in the room were a pair of rather unlovely glass tumblers. I washed them out as best I could, dried them on Liana’s towel (which I felt was probably cleaner than my own) and returned to the bedroom, where Liana had already lit the candles, taken off her clothes, and wrapped herself in a bright, trans- lucent lungi. She uncorked the cognac, put her nose to the neck of the bottle, and drew deeply on the volatile aromas. Her eyes closed momentarily. She smiled. I held out the glasses and she poured two large measures.
I handed her the less unpleasant of the two tumblers and we raised them to just below eye-level.
‘What shall we drink to?’ asked Liana.
The candle flames flickered in the cross breezes, throwing dramatic shadows across the walls and ceiling. ‘To us?’ I suggested. ‘To a world that awaits us?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s lovely; I like that.’ We clinked glasses.
I watched Liana sip from her glass, savouring the fine brandy. As I lifted the glass to my lips, Liana suddenly threw back her head and emptied the glass in one.
‘Fantastic,’ she said, then, seeing me standing there nonplussed, started to laugh. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I love this stuff. And I don’t believe in treating it with any reverence. Cognac is nothing more than good hootch in my books; the best. Come on Michael, don’t just stand there gawping; we have a bottle to finish.’
By the third glass I was already feeling light-headed. Liana, however, whilst in a perfectly good mood, seemed not the least affected. I had never seen anyone drink like that. She evidently enjoyed it, but it might just as well have been grape juice for all the effect it had on her. At least, that’s how it seemed at the time.
By ten o’clock the bottle was three-quarters empty. Liana was now very giggly, as indeed was I. We fooled around a little - just sexual play - but did not make love. We recounted stories of drunken debauchery; Liana said she loved getting drunk on wine and brandy, but that anything else made her sick. I told her that everything made me sick, and she thought this hysterical and laughed continuously for ten minutes until, the tears streamed down her cheeks.
A small, barely perceptible change came over Liana after that. It wasn’t just that she seemed to lose interest in the sex games - this didn’t bother me at all, since by that time I was incapable of anything more than some rather inept fumbling - she also appeared nervous. By the time the bottle lay empty on the floor, she was looking quite distressed.
‘What’s wrong?’ I whispered. ‘What’s the matter? Liana?’ She looked at me as if I were a complete stranger, someone who shouldn’t even be in the same room as her.
‘Don’t hurt me, Michael...’
Her face took on that terrible expression again. For a moment I thought my heart had stopped beating; surely this wasn’t happening again! I had made no sharp movements, there had been nothing threatening in my tone or in the content of our conversation. There was no way she could interpret my actions as violent. This time I decided to nip this absurd idea in the bud.
‘I’d never hurt you Liana. Not ever. Do you understand?’ I was pretty smashed, but the urgency, the terror in her eyes had a strong sobering effect. I didn’t move, I didn’t reach out. Nevertheless, she shrank away from me. She looked like a small, frightened child.
‘You’re drunk,’ she said, accusingly. ‘I know what you’re like when you’re drunk.’
This confused me still further. ‘What do you mean? You’ve never seen me drunk. This is the first time . . .’
‘Don’t get angry,’ she interrupted. Her voice had that desperate, pleading tone to it. ‘Please, I’ll do anything. just don’t get angry.’
‘Liana, I promise you.’ I wasn’t sure what else to say, what else to do. I thought about getting up and leaving the room so that she wouldn’t feel threatened by my presence, but I didn’t like to leave her alone. I figured that if I just stayed completely still and talked to her gently, she’d see that there was nothing to worry about. It took a supreme effort of will not to reach across and put my arms around her; she looked so scared, so pathetic, all I wanted to do was hold her.
It is always on occasions such as this that the cosmos decides to show its true nature, to tease us, to make a mockery of our efforts, of our lives. After just a few minutes, with all that cognac swirling around inside me, I had a desperate need to take a leak. I knew that if I didn’t do something about it swiftly, I’d probably wet myself.
‘Liana, I need to use the toilet. I’m going to stand up, go to the bathroom, and then come straight back. Okay? Liana, is that okay?’
She looked at me suspiciously for a moment, then nodded.
I moved as slowly as I could, pushed myself on to my feet and tottered to the bathroom. The relief I felt was lost however beneath the hurt I felt at the indignity of the situation. My world was falling apart and all I could do was piss into a toilet bowl.
When I returned to the bedroom Liana was as I had left her. I stood in the bathroom doorway for a few moments, trying to collect my thoughts.
‘Liana, I won’t hurt you,’ I said again. ‘I couldn’t hurt you. Why don’t you come and sit beside me? I promise everything will be okay.’
Another rash promise. My life, sometimes, appears a frail stuttering thing, with the main protagonist lurching from one feeble oath to the next, like a spastic frog desperate to land on something real but finding only fragile lilies that will not hold his weight.
I held out my hands towards her and tried smiling. Liana just stared at me and made no efforts to reach out to me.
‘What’s this all about Liana? Why do you think I’m going to hurt you? I won’t hurt you. I love you.’
As the words left my lips, Liana’s face contorted into a snarl. ‘It’s always the same thing,’ she spat. ‘Love. I know all about your sort of love; you can’t fool me with your clever words. They mean nothing.’
There was such hatred in her voice; it was as if I had just been run through with a sword. I felt a sharp pain slice through my chest, and then a dull ache invaded me, as if part of my soul had just died.
Until then I had thought myself, whilst not in control of the situation, at least in charge of my own emotions. But such was the hostility in Liana’s voice that all of a sudden I was overwhelmed with a feeling of desperation. She did not believe me, did not trust me. I could not touch her, hold her or even speak to her. The tears welled up in my eyes and although I tried to control myself, the effort was too great. My legs felt weak, I started to shake. How much of this was due to the drink I could not have said. All I knew was that a moment later I had sunk to my knees, head in hands, and was sobbing uncontrollably.
Sometime later - I don’t know how long - I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up. Liana was kneeling before me. A certain calm had returned to her expression, but she looked terribly sad.
‘Don’t cry, Michael,’ she said softly. ‘Please don’t cry.’
I shook my head. She put her hand to my cheek. ‘Please don’t cry,’ she said again.
I was still so choked I could barely get the words out. ‘Who did this to you Liana? Who did this terrible thing to you?’
Her eyes filled with tears. She put her arms around me, pulled me towards her, and cradled my head against her breasts.
‘Poor Michael,’ she said, rocking me back and forth. ‘Poor, poor Michael.’
Chapter 19
I have known Rachel for over twenty years. We were childhood friends. We went through school together. When I went to Sussex, Rachel continued her education at Bristol. We maintained contact during this period, although we saw each other rarely. For the last eight years, Rachel has lived
in London; she is my one real link with the city. Rachel understands me better than my own family, and I am probably her closest friend.
She is a lovely woman: tall, strikingly attractive, exceptionally intelligent, very warm. She draws people of like mind and disposition around her; she has the most loyal friends of anyone I know; she is generous to a fault, and people will do anything for her. Yet she is not married and rarely has a man in tow. She has one problem, a problem that hangs over her head like the Sword of Damocles. Rachel would love to have a partner - but she hates sex. Penetration causes her extreme pain, and after intercourse she is often physically sick. Three gynaecologists have assured her that there is nothing wrong with her physically, that the sharp, shooting pains she feels are almost certainly psychosomatic, and that perhaps she should seek a different sort of professional help. Which is a great irony, since Rachel is, by profession, a psychoanalyst.
We have talked about her difficulties often, but have rarely made any headway. She says she has normal feelings of desire; she finds certain men attractive, and will often want to go to bed with them. But once she’s alone with them, once clothes are removed and the first moves are made, she is overcome with a sense of panic. No matter how much she tries to control this, it is to no avail. Nine times out of ten, sex will be abandoned before it has even started, with much distress on both sides and, inevitably, dreadful recriminations.
You would think - bearing in mind her experience, connections and common sense - that Rachel might have attempted to seek advice from her professional colleagues, but she has not. When I suggested hypnosis, perhaps, as a way of discovering the source of this debilitating condition, Rachel dismissed it without rational explanation. Which is a pity, because I am certain that the key to releasing her from this prison lies buried in her past. My only evidence is something she once said to me, early one morning, whilst still half asleep.
Rachel likes sleeping with me. We can lie together in the same bed, completely naked, and there is no possibility that anything of a sexual nature will occur. We have known each other too long for that and, thankfully, are not physically attracted to each other. Even these days, if I am not abroad and Liana is not around, Rachel and I will seek each other out. It is a fine, mutual arrangement that gives us both comfort and warmth. Rachel feels safe with me; we often fall asleep in each other’s arms.
After one such night I woke a little earlier than Rachel, and stayed in bed staring at the ceiling, allowing random thoughts to jostle around in my head, watching them settle to their own levels. After some five minutes of this, Rachel stirred, gave a little sniff, then snuggled up to me. She murmured a barely coherent, “Good morning,” and kissed me on the chest.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked, stroking her hair.
‘Mmm, fine,’ she mumbled. ‘Strange dream.’
‘What happened?’
‘Not sure.’
‘Tell me.’
She was still pretty dozy, so it was difficult to follow the stream-of-consciousness retelling of her dream, but the gist of it was as follows.
She was asleep in her bed, not in this flat, but in the house she had lived in as a child. She knew it was her old bedroom because of the blue and white wallpaper and the moth-eaten teddy bear that lay beside her on the pillow. Her parents had been entertaining friends and family to dinner. She had had to go to bed at eight o’clock but was not tired, and could hear them all laughing and talking in the dining room. At some point - she wasn’t sure when - she heard her bedroom door open, and then heard footsteps. She saw the silhouette of her favourite uncle - her father’s older brother - come towards her. He knelt down next to her and kissed her on the forehead. His breath smelt terrible; a smoky, beery smell. He whispered something in her ear but she didn’t understand, and then she felt his hand under the covers. He tried to kiss her again, only this time on the lips, which she didn’t like, and just as she turned her head away she felt a sharp pain in her abdomen. The pain had woken her.
It does not, I think, take either a dream specialist or an analyst to draw the obvious conclusion.
After telling me about the dream, Rachel dozed off again for an hour. When later that morning I asked her about the dream, she looked at me blankly and claimed she could remember nothing. I did not repeat what she had told me, something I still regret to this day.
Chapter 20
My first thought was that someone had broken my neck. I opened my eyes to a world that I did not, initially, recognise, although it was not long before I realised that this was a problem of perspective rather than perception. I was jammed up against one end of the bed, my body twisted and contorted in a manner that I could not have devised deliberately. I could not move my head as it was crammed into the corner of the room at an angle which, I was sure, defied all natural laws.
Of more immediate concern was the fact that I could not feel my left arm; it was completely numb from fingertips to elbow and, for the best part of half a minute, I succumbed to a terrible panic; I had severed a nerve, I had cut off the blood supply to my hand, I would never have the use of my arm again. What the fuck had happened to me?
There was, in addition, a distinct lack of sensation in my legs, and a heavy pain in my lower back, as if I had been kicked repeatedly by an angry mule wearing jackboots. The relentless throbbing in my temples, a persistent dull thud of monotonous regularity, was offset by an unpleasant, nauseating, high-pitched whine in my left ear, which suggested that, whatever it was I had done to myself, the damage was almost certainly irreparable.
As if all this were not bad enough, every time I drew breath my body was wracked by sharp pains in my chest and a hot, acidic rasping in the throat. My mouth was so dry that my tongue had become virtually immobile. Hangovers were not new to me, but this one had a personality all of its own. As all these terrible afflictions clocked on, one by one, I became more and more despondent; this was no way to start the day, any day.
Liana was fast asleep beside me, snoring heavily. She looked peaceful enough, and had managed to remain unknotted for her night’s journey into dreams; I was just the slightest bit envious, and noted, even in my reduced state, a desire to wake her roughly and blame her for my ills.
But I did not wake her. Instead, drawing on whatever internal resources were still left to me, I got out of bed - carefully - and staggered to the bathroom. A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, according to some know-it-all Chinaman. What he didn’t say is that sometimes a journey of just five yards can start with tripping up over your own foot, and finish a few moments later, the intended destination still a lifetime away.
I had neglected to take into account just how numb my legs were, and their refusal to pay attention to instructions from the central nervous system was a crushing blow to me so early in the morning. I did not dare risk another fall; I was feeling so fragile by this stage that I figured one more dive and I would shatter into a million pieces. I crawled the rest of the way to the bathroom, co- ordinating hand and knee with great effort. Had I been able to appreciate it more, I’d have realised what a fascinating experiment this was in regression; I was being given the opportunity to experience, with the consciousness of an adult, just what it felt like as a baby to become independently mobile for the first time.
Unfortunately, such appreciation was sadly absent that morning so by way of compensation I had to settle for the sense of achievement that accompanied my having reached the bathroom without further mishap.
Although we had hot water, I opted for a cold shower in the hope of reviving my aching head and suffering body. The Chinese (there they are again) believe that a shower not only cleanses the body but invigorates the spirit. As a general rule this may hold, most of the time, but it is not, alas, a universal law, as anyone observing me that morning would have seen for themselves. I left the bathroom feeling even more battered than when I had entered. Whereas before I had been merely in agony and wanting to die, now I was cold, wet, in agony, and wanted to
die an especially quick death.
It took further extraordinary efforts to dress myself, as every limb felt like it was encased in a plaster cast. My vision was none too clear either, so I have no idea whether or not I left the room in a decent state.
The sun was neither warm nor beautiful that morning, just mean and angry. I made my way, delicately, to the hotel lawn, sat down on a comfortable cane chair beside a small marble table and ordered some breakfast. I was immediately thankful that Pushkar was a holy city and therefore strictly vegetarian, so I could not order fried eggs which in India are certain to be served burnt on the bottom, uncooked on the top, swimming in a glutinous amalgam of fat and albumen, and guaranteed to make you feel sick, even if you were in perfect health when you started the day.
I settled instead for tea and toast. The toast was unusual; I think the cooks in the kitchen had waved the slice of bread somewhere in the vicinity of the flames for a moment, and then soaked the lukewarm bread in something resembling animal fat. The tea was good, if you like that sort of thing. They have a unique way of making tea in India; one would be hard pressed to devise a method better suited to totally ruining one of the finest drinks in the world. Take a large kettle, fill it with cold water, tea leaves, milk and sugar, put it on the flames and wait for the whole lot to boil, then strain through an oily rag, and voilà, chai! It’s an acquired taste; one with which, thankfully, I had already become very familiar.
Kissing Through a Pane of Glass Page 7
