Dear Thief: A Novel

by Samantha Harvey

  I saw her, and she gave me a ticket to a matinee that afternoon of a Pinter play that she couldn’t go to because she had been called into work; she was supposed to be going with her daughter and she insisted that I went so that her daughter wouldn’t be on her own. The play was Monologue, one man speaking for half an hour to the empty chair next to him where he imagined his friend of old to be. Ruth’s daughter was rapturous about it afterwards, about the subtext and everything that wasn’t said. For myself, for half of the play I’d fought the urge to go and sit in the empty chair. For the other half I’d fought the urge to leave and find an address to send this letter to. No good writing to Butterfly if Butterfly can never read what’s written, no good. Not a form of expression at all, but a form of silencing. No good this man talking to a chair, better that he talked to his own navel than to a seat without a sitter.

  I went to the map shop on Long Acre and bought a map of Lithuania, which I took home and studied. How else am I to start finding you? If I went to the Lithuanian Embassy and asked to see a phone book I know you wouldn’t be in it. If I asked the handful of people I know who knew you, they’ll have less idea about you than I have. It feels like a form of code-breaking to squint at this map and try to fathom you from the printed pixels, to try to deduce your whereabouts from things you said, did, bought, thought, things you hoped for, things you hated. There are areas I know you won’t be, the towns and cities. I think you must be in the forest. Probably because of what you wrote on Teddy’s postcard about living in the desert I’m drawn towards Nida and the west, though I know there are far too many tourists for you to be near the dunes themselves. The north-western forests maybe, close to the Latvian border where nobody will think to look for you.

  By the time Nicolas came round in the evening I was cooking; I smiled when I saw it was him at the door. I had been singing to the music coming in through the window. I had drunk a little. We ate a split portion of pasta and mussels and played a hand of Whist. But as we were lying in bed about to sleep I thought of the map I’d folded and put on the bookshelf, and then of the lost cow shin somewhere in the Thames or on the shore, and of the lock of black hair in a box between two sheets of newspaper. Every gentle notion I’d trained myself to have deserted me for no reason, as if I were two people in one form. I do good, I sponge down aching backs, I inject insulin painlessly, I massage knotted feet. Most things have become alright by me, most arrangements, I don’t distinguish between the conventional and unconventional or the good and bad, and I don’t have any interest in judging. But sometimes still, even on a day that’s going well, this lack of tolerance, what Nicolas this evening called the dirty fire: you burn and leave soot, he said when I asked him suddenly to go home.

  But it was his fault, I told him. He came round on a whim, he ate half my dinner, I was still hungry as a matter of fact, I had nine mussels. Nine! I was starving. He had his elbow on my hair while we made love and because he was so deeply absorbed in his own pleasure I couldn’t attract his attention to tell him it was pulling. My scalp was sore, in case he was interested, and I was tired of winning at Whist and didn’t understand why he couldn’t make an effort. Just a small effort to win! Would it hurt?

  So he got out of bed and plucked his clothes off the floor. ‘You burn and leave soot,’ he said on his way out. ‘My mother warned me about you, she warned me about beautiful women, their aftermath.’

  ‘Your mother was a despot,’ I replied, and I shoved the door closed behind him with my foot and sat down to write this, and have been writing it since with the map spread on the floor. Now that dawn is coming the feeling of intolerance has gone completely, and all I have, looking at the map, is a recollection of you talking about the disappearance of your country’s forests, hacked down by the Russians and replaced with chemical plants and fertiliser works. Whatever upset me before now seems to have transferred onto these lost ash and oak groves and become more a sense of regret. Nicolas’ mother was not a despot, she was soft-shouldered and charitable. When there are so many true things that can be said in life, I don’t know why I say the things that aren’t.

  Does this come hard to you, when I say Nicolas was here? Or does it make you laugh?

  There is a particular thing he used to always do with me; I don’t know if he ever did it with you. He would be bouncing a football from one knee to the other, or hurling a tennis ball at the back wall of the house and catching it on the rebound, or cooking, or reading Private Eye, and as I passed him he would tease, ‘It doesn’t matter how much you know, you will never know what I’m thinking now.’ It pleased him, he would stop what he was doing—put one hand on my stomach, one on my lower back, and kiss my neck in delight at this philosophical ace he found in his hand; ah yes, we are each of us fortified palaces! There is a room at the centre that nobody will ever reach. It made the corner of his mouth twitch. ‘Unless I tell you what I’m thinking, you can never know it. Even if you know everything else in the world,’ he would say.

  When I think of him being here, or wait for him to arrive, I think of him as if he will still be like this—with his boylike smile and his curved brow and his pleasure at this little game that was almost sexual, that said I could never drill down deeply enough to know what he was really made of, but which invited me to try. But it is nothing like this any more, as I have perhaps said. There is no longer this simultaneous invitation and denial; instead he comes round and we talk about Teddy and he sits on the sofa with his hands clasped and smiles as if all I see is all I get. At night, he used to wake me up to tell me something of no consequence—sometimes a joke, sometimes an anecdote, bubbles that rose to the surface of his mind when it was dark and quiet; now he sleeps as if he is catching up with all those accumulated years of wakeful moments, sleeping off the jokes, the little tales, while I get stuck in bad dreams.

  (I say bad dreams, and I mean it literally, as in a bad book or a bad film—dreams that show no imagination whatsoever. I am about to sit an exam without having revised, I have to catch a flight and I am walking with my suitcase along an empty road, in search of the airport. I wake up and remember the dreams with grubby embarrassment; they call up a flash of otherwise defunct religious shame. I see the Lord shift and roll his eyes. Why, when he has given his people brains of extraordinary power and infinite creativity, must they keep dreaming about exams and being late for flights? And I see him finally forsake me, not because I have wronged him but because I have bored him.)

  But you know, it is strange, since beginning this letter on Boxing Day I have started having dreams on your behalf, or at least I don’t know if they are my dreams or yours—I dream them, but I am never in them. You’re in them, and everything is felt through you. Like this one with the rat, which I’ve had the last three times Nicolas has stayed. It is a dream with certain small variations, but each is essentially the same. You are in a room with a rat, which is running towards you. A boisterous dog appears and it picks the rat up in its mouth and brings it to the single bed where you sit pressed against the wall, pleading with the dog to go away, which of course it doesn’t. When it jumps on you, and lays the rat on your chest, you wake up.

  Variations: a friend or parent is in the room and has let the rat loose on purpose to frighten you. Or you take the bedside table and smash the last ounce of oxygen out of the rat’s lungs until its flesh is pressed between the floorboards and its blood is all over the walls. Liquid always seems to increase when spilt; it didn’t seem like much blood when inside the rat, but now it looks enough to have come out of a goat.

  I wake up when I have these dreams and usually get up, and Nicolas’ rosary clinks against the metal bedstead where he hangs it. I associate this sound with him being in my house. This is when I want to write to you most, after the rat dreams, and I often do. Much of this letter has been written in those odd hours of the night, where the darkness is thick and airless and like soil.

  So what is this rat? Why, in my dreams, are you always cowering from it? See how many
pages it has taken me to tell you that Nicolas comes over from time to time, and has been doing so for the last year, on and off—this is because I feel ashamed to say it. I think you will mock our cowardice at breaking away but not breaking away. Or you will think we are feeding on your scraps. You who perpetually gamble everything on a whim, just to be free. You who hear the bear in the woods and open your door to let it in. You who can so little stand the scenery staying the same that you have to run through it. To keep running. But Yannis said something the other day, when I asked him about his wife—he said it is the cowards who keep running, and I wonder if he is right. The bravest people are those who are not afraid of things staying the same.

  You didn’t analyse personalities in the way I am analysing yours. Your strategy was to go to war with people first and ask questions later.

  You sit at our table in the cottage in Morda, by the back window, dealing out cards for Solitaire. You take up position here for the best part of a year or two with your Go-Cat playing cards, which you picked up at a church sale in the village. Green-backed with a sinister picture of a tabby. A Square Meal for Bored Cats. You never meant to stay so long, certainly you never meant to live with us, but time bleeds. There is nowhere else you have to be, it is good for me to have an adult presence in the house when Nicolas is away, Teddy loves you for reasons nobody can quite identify, and anyway, time bleeds. You arrive, and before you know it six months have passed and then six more, and your money comes in useful and the back window would be empty without your silhouette.

  Some days you are as plain and pale as the northerly light coming through the window behind and we leave you alone in the veil of smoke that makes you look like a sullen bride, bored at her own wedding table. Other days, like this particular and arbitrary day, your eyelids will be painted in heavy purples or oranges right up to the brow and sweeping wide towards your temples, lashes almost unliftably black and heavy. This particular and arbitrary day it is orange and Teddy touches the paint with his finger to see if it is hot. When you raise your eyes from the cards there appears to be an effort; already wide-spaced, these eyes look like they are trying to take off from your face like a weighty bird that needs something to launch itself from but is finally graceful in flight, an albatross, something that means to travel far.

  Only your eyes are made-up, in contrast your face is naked and your lips as pale, plump and bare as a bottom, as breasts; I imagine this is what Nicolas is thinking when he says you are disconcerting to look at, like somebody undressed from the waist down. Some days you will be done up like this, some days not. For a time, when you are going most frequently back and forth to London, it is more often than not. You are too much for Morda, but then you always were. You hardly ever go out and when you do I am sure people comment between themselves on sighting you in a lane, as if you were exotica escaped from the zoo.

  Instead you play our old table like a veteran croupier, sweeping up the Solitaire hand when I come along and transforming it in seconds into a Poker hand; you just want somebody to do light battle with. The combat zone, we call the table, and a ring forms in the oak grain where your ashtray sits, next to your right hand. You push half the matchsticks you have towards the centre to stay in the game, nails tapping while you wait for me to have a go, head resting languid in a cupped hand. Head surely heavy with the weight of your eyes. ‘Your hair is alive,’ you tell Nicolas when he sits with Teddy in his arms. The crown of his head touches the ceiling, which is lower in the alcove by the window, and his hair rises and waves with static like some plant on the riverbed. ‘You could sell that electricity back to the grid,’ I say. ‘We will be rich at last.’

  I push my last few matchsticks in and you murmur, with a smile, Hallelujah! and astonish Nicolas by folding; you had nothing in your hand. I knew you had nothing, you knew I knew, I knew you knew I knew. It is like this with us, no explaining it. Just that games are more interesting between us when we pretend not to know what the other is up to. Teddy stands on Nicolas’ lap and pushes the static out of his hair, cackling with mirth. ‘There go our riches,’ you say, and gather the cards up as swift as a thief.

  About four months ago, back in October or early November, Ruth mentioned that there was a shortage of life models at the drawing school she goes to, and two weeks later I found myself lying, as if shot, on crusted mustard velvet on an improvised bed in an old chapel with fan heaters turned on me, slightly aggressively I thought, like muskets. I didn’t think long about this decision and I can’t even say it really was a decision so much as a thing I found myself doing, and then doing again. The first time I went to meet the tutor for an interview her eyes lit up. Five foot ten of barely contained dilapidation! An elegance so surface that a pencil nib will scratch it away in no time and find the disaster beneath. This is all art wants, to scratch at the surface and find disaster beneath. You will be a perfect model, she said, and there was no interview, and now I am their emergency on-call nude body who has no regular class but goes when they need me and when work allows. After every class she says, ‘You were so perfect’ (like a bombed temple, she means), and gives me £20, which ought to be £21 for my three-hour sacrifice, but she never has the extra pound in change.

  Is this one last act of vanity, I wonder? Yes, I’m sure. Vanity, and also its unlikely partner, surrender. It makes me feel like a piece of fruit in your photograph. I lie or sit (always on this mustard velvet drape that I think used to be a curtain back in its day and now has almost no velvet qualities at all, is more like the grit of a newly fired brick) and I can feel time acting on me, and I have the odd sensation that they can see me ageing as they draw. In some ways this is a tragic feeling, and in some ways wonderful. It’s too late, I think. The days of being desired and being burdened by desire and competing for it, these days are over and now I am what’s left. I give myself over as a sorry offering, I put the twenty-pound note in my pocket at the end and go and buy a book and some cigarettes and some ink, and feel cheap and free and taken from in some small way that I can’t afford. Give what you can’t afford, you used to say; give more than you have. Live in divine debt, it’s the only way to get any return from life. I think in many ways you were right about this. I ache all over and I have shown my bare, pale groin to strangers, and that £20 is the sorriest amount of money I ever make. And it is wonderful really, to be so open at last about this rigged deal we make with life. It is wonderful in its own way.

  ‘It’s sordid,’ Nicolas said when I asked him what he thought of your Still Life with Irascible Hole. He laughed at the title and said, with exaggerated purr, ‘irr-ascible’. And with exaggerated pout, ‘hole’. His mouth surrounded the word and closed it down. He is a man who has always leant a little towards darkness, and for him to call it sordid was no criticism. For him, back then at least, the world was too light, yet also never light enough. Even in the most literal of ways he craved darkness just so that he might shine light into it, and then resented the light for banishing the dark; but we are all paradoxical, aren’t we? We all give ourselves over to these internal battles that we’ll never resolve.

  At dinner that evening with my parents I brought up the photograph again. I’m speaking here about events that happened almost a quarter of a century ago, so forgive some laxness with the detail—I remember so well the purr and the pout, and they seem to eclipse my memory around the point I’m trying to make. Because I am trying to make a point. I’m trying to tell you that Nicolas found your photograph sordid and that over the years this appraisal has changed, which I think symbolises something, the meaning of which might be too painful to face. It began when I said over dinner, ‘Nicolas finds the photograph sordid, do you think he’s right?’ When my father asked Nicolas in what way, he answered, ‘Well, it’s all juices and holes, is it trying to be funny?’ ‘Perhaps so,’ my father said, ‘perhaps it is trying to be funny in its own inadvertent way, but that would be its secondary function.’ My mother said that more than sordid or funny, it was a waste of f
ruit, to which Nicolas laughed guiltily in a way people do when caught between the sacred and profane.

  I stayed out of this conversation, having provoked it. My father was right, if the photograph was funny at all it was only by default. You rarely made any attempt at humour, more at depreciation, which meant stripping away the borrowed value of something until it was left with whatever was its own. If that deflowering made it funny, then so it was. I saw Nicolas looking at it several times over the course of that weekend, which was his second visit to Morda, with morbid fascination as if something in him were being pulled into the hole at its centre.

  I don’t recall him saying anything more about it for the next six years, even as it hung in the hallway of our home in London, and after that the living room of our miners’ cottage near Morda. He only made a comment again after he had met you for the first time, and then he said that as a work of art he suddenly found it quite trite, quite obvious. He meant by that something grave—that any benefit of the doubt he had given it before was annulled by meeting you, in whose context the photograph was now made clear. He no longer called it sordid. Sordid meant that it and its creator might stir him in some way, obvious meant that neither it nor its creator had any such power to stir one way or another.

  Do you understand me when I say it is possible to see a change in another person that they do not yet see in themselves? My grandmother said that insight of this kind was the Lord working through one’s eyes, just as he may work through ears, hands and the senses in general, without limit and whenever so called upon. Lord or not, when Nicolas proclaimed your still life obvious I saw him, without knowing it himself, put up his first defence against his love for you. Two decades later and still it goes on. Recently, in a discussion of the photograph with Ruth and another of her friends from the hospital, he dismissed their praise of it and called it quaint. ‘The light’s good,’ he said. ‘But it’s not radical or troubling or even meaningful; if it’s anything, it’s just quaint.’