Gwyneth Jones - Life(2005)

by Anonymous Author

  You, meaning the world, meaning everything...

  Transferred Y was her refuge and her passion. But her soul had grown richer, stranger, stronger. She was in love with the world: the world that included, deeply woven and never to be lost, the death of her child.

  * * *

  Spence got round to telling her that he'd had Lily Rose baptized. So they were out about it with each other. Good luck to those well-padded enough to need no shelter, but most people cling to something, once they've noticed how much grief there is in the world. Anna and Spence need not be ashamed to join the majority. Catholicism, tarnished mess, had the advantage that it didn't tell you there was something wrong with you if you weren't smug and happy. It allowed people to suffer. "I feel I know you better," he said, after this conversation. And the sex was still good. Well, to tell the truth, the sex was mechanical these days, but declared wonderful, for old time's sake.

  They didn't do much socializing—which Spence had started to miss—because of Anna's insanely long hours. When he went to London he would hang out with Rosey and Wol, and Marnie and the current toyboy. There was Simon Gough in Sheffield, and sometimes, rarely, he and Anna would go out with Roz and Graham, or some of the old Parentis gang. It wasn't a bad life.

  He was reading a fat hardback biography of Keats that someone had abandoned in his room in Woods, back in first year. Because he only read it on the train he wasn't getting through it very fast. It was a winter's day, the beginning of another year. There were grim developments in the world and a brutal gap in the New York skyline that made him wince every time he saw it; but that was a reflex. He'd got into the habit of caring very little what went on beyond the narrow, weary confines of his life. History is not my business. The line from London to Leeds was routed through the ugliest face of the English landscape. One dirty-looking dormitory town followed another, separated by swathes of dingy agribusiness. He was tired. He wanted a drink but couldn't be arsed to go down to the buffet car and the aisle trolley didn't appear to be rolling. He was not getting off on Keats's biographer, but he needed something to control the mental fidgets that always plagued him on this return journey. He kept his eyes trucking from word to word. A pet lamb in a sentimental farce. You couldn't help but like someone who'd describe the failure of his first hopes that way. You could feel the sharp wit and raw distress, bleeding through the years. He read.

  "Ethereal thing(s) may at least be thus real, divided into three heads—Things real—things semi-real—and no things. Things real— such as existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakespeare— Things semi-real such as Love, the Clouds & which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist—and Nothings which are made Great and dignified by the ardent pursuit. Which by the by stamps the burgundy mark on the bottles of our Minds, insomuch as they are able to 'consecrate what'er they look upon. . .' "

  A wash of dread fell through his mind, like the shadow of a manta ray dropping through blue water. He didn't know what was happening. Then he realized that he was back in the sluice room or whatever that, place was in the hospital. He was holding Lily Rose in his arms, and a voice he didn't recognize but he had always known was saying to him you're as well-qualified as I am. But she was dead, she was a piece of meat. The tiny child who lived in his mind had never been anything but meat. Wriggling meat inside Anna, then dead meat. There was no Lily Rose. She had never existed, except in that Spence himself had called her up, created her out of nothingness. He had to let her go, dismiss the phantom, or he was a pet lamb in a sentimental farce.

  He put the biography away, zippered his case, and got off the train. He must have done these things because he found himself standing clutching his bag among strangers, the train to Leeds sailing away. He walked up and down, he stopped and stared at the ballast between the tracks, in a state of horrible, bewildering agitation. His little girl, this tiny girl bundled up in woollies, trotting by his side. . . He had never told Anna, had never brought himself to confess how concrete the little ghost had become, growing instead of fading. Now she had to go, he had to tear her up and throw her away. He had been using Lily Rose's imaginary existence as a crutch, secretly knowing that when he was stronger he would dump her into non-existence again. That had been his position: same as his attitude to religion. Believe it if you need it, and if that means you use the crutch lifelong, well why not? But why this panic, this shaking horror? It came to him that he was being told (that letter of Keats had slammed the idea into his head) that the reality of such things depends on the observer. This doesn't make Lily Rose less real, it's just the truth, the very truth, you make her be, she lives in you. He felt dizzy and sick. He felt as if he had been led through the mysteries of Eleusis. Lily Rose lives, if I can handle knowing that I am her creator, that Godhead is in me. . . He walked up and down, shuddering in the terrible rush of this vision: thinking, ah God, poor God, how do you stand this, you poor bastard.

  He was having a flashback, it happens to the bereaved: you think it's all over and then wham, the thing is immediate again, driving you crazy. Maybe this happens especially after a death like the death of a stillborn child: which is not supposed to count, so that you hurried the original mourning.

  The skies had fallen, but he could pull it together. He felt better already.

  As it happened, Anna was even later at getting home that evening, so that Spence arrived expecting an anxious welcome to find the house dark and empty. The heat wasn't on, because she hated to spend a penny on "unnecessary" bills. He understood that she needed her independence. She was trying to carve out a little poverty for herself, within the domain of Spence's executive salary. But it was depressing.

  She came in to find him sitting in the dark on the folded futon couch.

  "Spence?"

  "I can't go on."

  His voice sounded oddly thickened—and of course accusing. "I'm sorry. I know it was my turn to cook. I'll put something together quickly. Are you getting a cold?"

  "We could fucking have fucking takeaway, for once. Without breaking the bank."

  "Spence, what's wrong? It isn't the end of the world. You could have started the cooking."

  "It's not that, didn't you hear me, I said I can't go on. I hate this life. I hate wearing a suit, I hate this house, I hate living with someone who barely knows I exist."

  "Okay." Anna was not surprised. Now that it had happened she knew this scene had been coming for a long time. Her pride rose up. "So leave. Go back to the States. We can get one of those no-fault divorces. I never meant to force you into marriage. Every day of my life I wish to God I'd never made that damned phone call—"

  Neither of them had noticed that the room was still dark.

  "Don't do that, it's what you always do, flying to extremes to escape an argument—"

  Then he really began to cry. She knelt on the couch and tried to hug him, but he pushed her away: and it all came out, how desperately he hated working for the company and living in this house, the house to which they would have brought home Lily Rose. Working in the room that should have been the baby's, and Anna never there, even when she was at home, even when they were fucking, which was rare enough, she was thinking about her work, about anything but Spence.

  Anna wrenched her mind away from her flaky cell cultures. It was true, she had been neglecting him and neglecting sex. Spence didn't understand that while for him sex made everything all right, for her the lead weight in her heart made sex all wrong. Sex was happiness and she had none, only endurance, pride, and sometimes joy. They should have talked the thing out. Too late now. Time to deal with the underlying reality.

  "I feel it too," she said. "I bury myself in work, but I know. This isn't what we planned."

  She reached out her arms again. They lay huddled breath to breath. "I know what we can do," said Anna. "I have a cunning plan." (Thinking: so this is what I do with my new strength, and finding in herself a satisfaction greater than Transferred Y, her shoulders bowing willingly, proud to
do the world's work, any kind of world's work, now I make my husband happy.) "We leave. Fuck my doctorate; fuck your company. I have marketable, skills, I'll market them. Infertility is big business, it's international. We can travel the globe."

  "I won't let you do that. You live for your career."

  She would lose Transferred Y, but she would have paid her debt. She would be equal with Spence again. Nothing could bring back Lily Rose, but she would recover the purity of their contract, and that would be plenty to live on.

  "I let you marry me," she said. "Now you have to let me do this."

  ii

  Ramone had a moment of epiphany on late night television. It was a program about decadence; she and the other guests were supposed to be collapsed at the end of a debauch, dressed in fancy underwear and rolling around in purple satin sheets. Ramone was trying to explain what Praise Song was about: this glaring flaw running through intellectual life, everyone stuck in the groove of the enlightenment experiment, calling betterment and progress failed concepts and still thinking in terms of betterment and progress. Epimetheus is one who builds on what went before; a praise song is what you do when someone is dead.

  But they had hired her because of Mère Noire, which was so much more accessible. So this man, fake debauchee who was actually a presenter, said but surely the writer of Mère Noire hates women. Ramone gave her standard answer. Any woman that doesn't hate women is a bleep idiot (it was that sort of show). I want to exterminate women, wipe them from the face of the earth. I don't want to be liberated, I want to be a monster. He didn't get it. No one ever got it, and Ramone could have straightened them out by saying nobody is born a woman and that what she hated was the way she COULD NOT ESCAPE from the role of second-class person. No woman could, the only escape was to become SOMETHING NEW that had never existed before. And fuck them all; she'd rather be misunderstood than acceptable. . . But he was impressed by her anger. She saw the alarm coming up in his eyes. It never ceased to amaze her, that fear. For fuck's sake, she thought, I weigh fifty kilos, that's about seven stone twelve, o dweller in the shades of departed empire, and I'm not even armed: what do you think I'm going to do? His fear gave her the illusion she'd made contact. It was only afterwards, back in the smart little hotel where they were putting her up near the studio, that she realized something had struck home. Like swaggering away from a fight and then finding that you were bleeding, strangely there seems to be quite a lot of blood: and now the pain begins.

  I hate women.

  I hate myself.

  Okay, fine. She pondered this medieval syllogism in terms of her partnership with Tex. Ramone did not accept the role of victim easily. It was true that she and Tex hit each other, but if Ramone usually ended up getting the worst of it that was purely because she was smaller, there was no gender-role implication. Or if there was it was by Ramone's own choice. She was her own victim; Tex was merely her blunt instrument, and he knew what was going on. People thought Tex was stupid, but he wasn't. It was because she'd seen the possibility of an honesty about male/female relationships that she'd never found with any other man that she had taken him away from Daz. Well, that and wanting to come first with one of them. With somebody. She'd known she didn't have a chance of being Daz's own true love. Daz was the kind of lesbian who was convinced nothing you did with a girl was really sex.

  With this new insight, it began to seem to her that maybe Tex did not understand. Maybe he had never understood the heuristic message of furious irony in her Mère Noire scripts. In fact it was possible that he was simply a sexually insecure sort of lad, who had settled for not-so-great-looking Ramone in exchange for fabulous Daz, because Ramone was not a challenge to his own mediocre attractions, and because she encouraged him to draw pictures of naked women with enormous tits getting the shit dicked out of them. Since Ramone hated women and was herself a woman, wouldn't she have chosen this kind of humiliatingly banal relationship? Rather than something deep, secretly very aware and post-gendered, about feeding off each other's twisted desires. . . ?

  Next time she felt like picking a fight with Tex she went to the gym instead. It was a tarty little women-only place, hidden inside the hollowed-out shell of an eighteenth century town house in Knightsbridge. Not many clients spoke English (which was a plus), and it could get extremely crowded on a Monday evening, when everyone was sweating and pumping away the excesses of the weekend. Ramone had secured herself a spot in front of the floor-length mirror to finish with some yoga, a skill-relic of her long-gone friendship with Anna Senoz. She took her eye off it for a moment; instantly a big beefy dyke with Popeye the Sailorman biceps plonked herself right in Ramone's body space. "Arsehole," muttered Ramone, with a covertly virulent grimace—forgetting the properties of a mirror.

  "What did you say?" asked the dyke, pugnaciously.

  "Arseholes," explained Ramone, "I said, arseholes, sss: kind of a general remark because I'd just picked a space and now it's gone. Nothing personal."

  The woman had a jaunty bristle cut and wide, flat cheekbones. Her skin was rosy brown like Anna's, but she was very Central Asia-looking. It was Ramone's bad luck that she understood English. Or good luck. By the end of this brief exchange it was clear that they liked the look of each other.

  "I like your tattoos." She touched one of them, a thorny rose bandeau around Popeye's massive upper arm. "I've got one like that on my fanny, but you can't see it because I let the hair grow back. I didn't like having no pubes, it causes chafing."

  "Are you doing anything after this?" asked the dyke, looking unaffectedly pleased and interested, so that Ramone felt guilty, because she already knew what she was planning.

  She had never picked anyone up from the gym before, but it worked fine. Popeye, whose name was Freda, which comes from Guinevere, the White-maned (as she was charmed to be told), didn't waste much time on pre-sex bonding. They went back to her place and only started chatting after the first fuck. Later she bought Ramone a meal and they went to a club where Popeye insisted on buying the drinks. Obviously she had no idea she was on a date with the writer of Mère Noire, tv chat-show guest and soon-to-be-famous post-feminist intellectual. Ramone was touched. She became this other Ramone, unemployed young lesbian single on the media fringe. She talked about the film-extra work in Paris as if it was the only work she'd ever had, and Freda was impressed.

  It was the next evening before they got back to the flat. Ramone knew Tex would be in because his car was there next to the Porsche, and he always stayed in, lying in wait, if Ramone had disappeared for a night on the tiles. She did the same to him. She rang their bell aggressively (it was a biggish house in Ladbroke Grove, they had the "penthouse" floor, the flats were expensive, but it was shabby in the stairwell). Just as she'd hoped, Tex came right out of the door to see who had rung, to observe her and the other woman on the landing in a heavy sexual embrace: Ramone riding Popeye's thigh and Popeye, a little shy but not at all reluctant, getting into it. She knew how he would react. He'd be turned on, he'd be furious, and he wasn't the type to exercise self-control in front of the visitor. And so it came about. Tex grabbed Ramone by the hair, which she had recently grown out into a ponytail at the back, and started punching. Ramone kicked him until he let go, and they began screaming at each other. She had a glimpse of Popeye splatted up against the wall looking, there was no other word for it, looking prim. Like some nice person who's been the victim of a crude practical joke, which was the truth, sad to say: like, my God, I have been eating dogdirt! Prim, repelled, disgusted, frightened, Guinivere the White-maned vanished forever as Tex dragged Ramone into the flat and slammed the door.

  They shared some more honesty and candor. It didn't turn into sex this time, that rambunctious scratching scrambling full energy sex, which was the only kind Ramone enjoyed, though his pvc trousers were tight enough that she could see he had a huge erection. She didn't mind. This was better than sex. She screamed at him, feeling immense quivers of fuckme, fuckme around her hole and up and down her in
ner thighs, but when he smacked her a blow across the face instead that was better. She smashed him back, using her nails and her full weight, oh god the release. We were born to hate each other. Your reproductive success is my destruction, same goes the other way round so let's duke it out, no more of that mealy-mouthed mom-and-pop complementarity shit, we know the truth now let's DO IT. . . RIGHT OUT IN THE OPEN. Better still, she now knew that Tex was not with her on the higher plane. He wasn't observing or reflecting or deducing or entering into the discourse, he was simply thumping her because she was a girl, she'd insulted him, and he could get away with it.

  Meanwhile Bill the parrot (Sambo had died of pneumonia the previous winter, and Ramone didn't want another monkey because that would be disloyal) unfortunately happened not to be in his cage and he couldn't get back into his cage because of all the honesty and candor flailing around in his flight path. He was screaming too at the top of his voice, but he wasn't reveling in orgiastic fury, he was terrified. Ramone started wishing she knew how to call a brief parley, for the bird's sake.

  Tex started going after Bill and fell headlong, having caught a glancing blow in the groin from the corner of his drawing table, which had crashed over on its side during the start of the bout. "I'm gonna get that bird," he shrieked, goaded by the affectless pain, so different from pain deliberately sought, slathered over with the tasty sauce of arousal. He started flicking at Bill with a damp towel that had been lying by the bathroom door, festering, for a few days. "STOP THAT! LEAVE HIM ALONE!"

  Tex flicked the towel again and hit Bill, who was clambering frantically among the hangings on the living room walls, on the side of the head. The parrot seemed to get dizzy. He struggled on, his cries now pathetically confused, almost timid, still making for his cage and safety. Then he fell, wings half open, and was blundering on the floor.