Once, you see, before Spain, he would have been too polite to refuse your food because you were a house guest and his wife’s friend; even after two years of you living with us he managed to maintain that courtesy. Now you and he had a relationship of your own, whatever that was, and that meant he could be critical of you in the way people can when they know a cord is not so fragile as to snap under a little pressure. You, who would once have hated to offend him, your friend’s husband, treated him with the confidence of somebody who has earnt the right to offend a thousand times.
And as for me, I sat without a word, docile and unruffled; I did not get up to make Nicolas something else, as I probably would have before, instead he got up and made us all something else, a quick thing like a fry-up, I expect. After dinner he went to put Teddy to bed and you washed up while I dried; it took you over half an hour. You were slow and heavy-lidded and moved your arms like a swimmer, and broke a plate by smashing it against the tap in a misjudged movement. Afterwards when you had sunk down into the sofa in a drowsy ebb and flow of consciousness and I went for a bath and Nicolas spread his paperwork on the bed and Teddy slept, I remember feeling almost content, a feeling I relate to being a child when my family was all together, one of knowing everything is in its place.
Everybody has a sudden power. Nicolas can say, I am not going to eat this. You can say, Starve then. I can refuse to get up and help. Nobody bears any responsibility to please, everybody is tongue-and-groove with everybody else. Nicolas takes on a new intensity in bed, which is to say, You are my wife. It is not gratitude that makes him passionate but a zealous kind of—what can I say?—revelry, revelry in the unbreakable bond, so that somehow the two of us have become closer, our marriage more magnificent, I think, in his eyes. You and I too, closer—in a de facto way more than a practical one, but all the same closer; because we are always closer when one has taken too much from the other. Always closer when ousting and threatening, because a meaningful relationship thrives on reasserting yourself against the other; that is what it is to relate rather than to be alone—which makes me realise now, as I write, how I never for a moment felt alone in that period between Spain and you leaving.
Neither could you have; you were busy turning your attention to the most intimate, faithful relationship of your life, one you practised in the privacy of your room. You affixed a lock to the inside of the door so that Teddy couldn’t amble in, and when you came out sometime in the early evening your face and neck were flushed and you would move languidly about the house in uninterruptible peace, and at times go about a period of prolonged, ecstatic cleaning, and then curl up in the armchair and sleep. Once a fortnight, you told me. One needed a strict limit with a drug like heroin, and one had to know where the tipping point was. For you it was once a fortnight, this and no more. If you could keep it this way you could manage the addiction and it was better, when you had it, it was all the better for the wait.
I suppose there is no more loyal and private a relationship than that between a user and her drug, it leaves no room for anybody else. Either you were locked with it in your own world or you were weathering out the time until you could have it again. At first this seemed workable, and certainly on that October morning in the mist, when you spoke about the gauze of life and you and Nicolas danced through your conversation about the deities of the morning, jubilant and quick-witted, certainly then you seemed lifted. But by Christmas of that year you would spend your fortnight in such anguish; you might not know how agitated you became then, irritable and barbed even towards Teddy, and restless, messy, withdrawn, more and more unkempt, a nightmare, a slow-occuring natural disaster. We went to the coast of Mid Wales one afternoon in early December and while we walked the coastal path you sat on a short promontory watching a wave smashing at a rock; I tell you this because I doubt very much you remember. We had to go back for you at the end of the walk and pull you to your feet. Your fists were clenched. This was what day thirteen began to look like, and then day twelve looked like it, and eleven.
And so I have told you, and I will tell you again, that I am not good, or lenient, or gentle. What kind of a friend will watch this happen and nod, and allow the idea that heroin only once every two weeks constitutes some sort of healthy, moderate regime? I was no kind of a friend to you, a thing we both know. It was not Gene’s docile passivity that made me accept our triangle. You had looked, shaken your head at me, shaken your head! No, you had said, do not intervene, and I had stood there in the humid Spanish night as if drugged, convinced that what was happening was somehow an inevitability of your fate, to which we were all silent witnesses and secondary players. But then you were always so convincing, and your fate was always the most pressing.
No, let me make it clear. I was not docile, or passive. I dressed myself up as the forgiving sort, but there is forgiving, and there is also tolerating, which is forgiveness in rags. And then there is something else, which is nothing short of a heartless fascination with somebody’s downfall. On our journey back from Spain, looking at you as you slept, I began to realise that if it was your fate you wanted, you could have it—your sad, sordid, wretched fate of self-annihilation. In my defence, Butterfly, you made it so easy, I never once had to lift a finger. I would never have chosen that path for you, I hope you know it. I have loved you, but you have not at any point made this the obvious or logical choice, and when I went into your room that January morning in 1985 I was not even sorry to find your bed stripped and your things gone.
Maybe if this letter is a form of defence it is only to object that I may be unkind but I am not weak, as I know you think I am. I am unkind because I didn’t want to forgive you or Nicolas, but I am not weak, because forgiveness of you was never my choice. You cannot forgive somebody who doesn’t ask to be forgiven. There is no point leaving somebody who agrees that you should leave. We can argue with a piece of bad reasoning in another, but we cannot argue with somebody who acts under the influence of love, as Nicolas did. I might almost have felt sorry for him after you left, if he had invited even a moment’s pity. In my ignorance and my hardness I hadn’t realised what effect you’d had on him, what you had given him, which I see now as the gift of risk and loss. Finally he stopped believing that you would come back, or that he would find the cow shin or the other half of his peacock figurine; he lost his foolishness and he broadened and aged like a tree.
Even weeks after you left he would comment that he could smell you on things, that sharp smell of saplings, of bitter green wood on the cushion on the armchair where you had taken to resting your head.
Yannis’ place is as clean as a child’s conscience. Together we spent today scrubbing it from top to bottom so he can try to sell it as a going concern rather than fold the business and give up the lease. This is after almost two weeks of deliberation and long phone calls to his wife in Crete, who is unbending. Have you ever tried to wield a cloth with a broken heart? I can tell you it cleans at half the rate. It was as if Yannis were trying to put back the grease the cloth was taking off, which was after all his grease, his footprints on the lino by the fryers, his fingerprints on the till.
‘A year,’ he said, ‘I will give it a year. And if my wife and Crete are giving me a headache I will come back.’
I told him this was a fair plan, but I know he will not come back because certain moves are irrevocable. I don’t know why this should be, only that we know in our hearts when they are, and the more we tell others how easy a thing is to undo, the more we know we never will undo it. I will miss him. Not only him, but the others here we sometimes play cards with—Christos, a Greek man Yannis knows from the cash-and-carry; Tam, a gentle Jamaican English teacher in his fifties who discovered Yannis’ shop through a love of baklava and who recently lost his wife; then there is the Nigerian, Muyi, whose suits are from House of Fraser, if you remember, and his friend Winnie. And others, but it is too late in the letter to tell you about them now.
Not that I know any of them well, except Yannis,
but sometimes it is the little rituals you miss most when they end. The scrape of coppers across the metal tabletop, Winnie using her thighs and the table as percussion to the traditional Ugandan songs she sometimes breaks into, olive-oil fingerprints blooming on the top left back of the nine of spades and just left of centre on the two of diamonds, and everybody noticing and noting and pretending they hadn’t noticed or noted; Muyi’s gifts of salted caramel truffles from some improbably priced place on Madison Avenue (he has brothers in New York and crosses the Atlantic probably more often than I cross the Thames), his enthusiasm for New York speakeasies, his intolerance of conservative white men, his vehement refutation when Yannis calls himself a conservative white man, despite that Yannis wants more than anything to be one. Muyi tells him he cannot be because he is an immigrant and self-made. Yannis visibly heats with frustration at this basic right being removed from him.
These speakeasies that Muyi goes to—he was telling us about them last night when we got together for a kind of pre-emptive send-off for Yannis, who might not leave for weeks, but these people have a great sense of ceremony. Apparently you have to access speakeasies with passwords and winks and membership fees that buy you a particular table and a waitress who knows how you like your gin. Muyi goes to ones in London, though there are hardly any, but the best are in New York. You push against a door that looks boarded up, he says, and you go past a doorman who pretends to be Mafia or a 1920s Chicago detective, you go up some stairs or down some stairs and through a second door, which might have been pulled off a shed or a phone booth or might be an old headboard for a bed or might be a bullet-proof bunker door writ with invective from the Old Testament about how God hates a drinker. Then you step into a low-lit secret temple, a gin den or vodka joint and a menu with fifty-plus cocktails and discreet barmen and beautiful black waitresses and live bands, as if it is still Prohibition.
I could see you in such a place. While Muyi was speaking, and pouring American gin with his lovely hands, I pictured you with him or somebody like him in a place like that. As everybody argued about the point of speakeasies in an age of legal alcohol (and Tam was calling them theme parks and telling Muyi he demeaned himself and black people by going to places that were invented, in part, to keep black people down) I was giving some of my attention, as I have come to do, to the street outside Yannis’ shop. I used to look for you only in the way people look out for dead loved ones, not because they expect to see them or even hope to, but just as a reflex, or maybe through curiosity. I wonder what it would be like if so-and-so walked around the corner now? Lately, do I look with something more like expectation? I don’t know if it could be called that, but I have at least run out of reasons why you couldn’t walk past. Something both sinks and rises in me, Butterfly, when I think like this.
At night most of what I can see in the glass is a group of people huddled round a high circular table with fans of cards. And last night the conversation continued about the revival of obsolete things, times, people and places, gangsters stabbing black men in back alleys without anybody so much as lifting a brow, beautiful black waitresses growing old with oppression. I was listening and not listening. I was looking out of the window at myself looking out of the window; I couldn’t peer around my own reflection, which was—pensive. (It has taken me a few minutes to land on that word, having gone through sad, defeated, nondescript, shadowy, wary, weary, confused, suspicious, anxious, wiry, concerned, murderous, lonely, defensive, dark, old, refined, narrow, superstitious—none of which were right, some of which were ridiculous and make me sound more like a piece of furniture than a human.) I looked pensive, or more specifically like someone who has been drawn down too many pathways of thought and is no longer able to double-back. Contrast this with Muyi, who must be in his forties and glows like a stone that gathers no moss. Or even Yannis, who is solid and guileless and fends off complexity like a cow. It is a crime to think too much. Yet I think too much. The thinking buries my sense of joy, which I know is there; and I am jealous of those like Muyi and Winnie who have not buried themselves like this.
But you did not bury yourself, either; you would get so far into your troubles and then break out irritably, impatiently, would throw your head back in raucous laughter and shrug the world off. Last night when Muyi was talking about New York speakeasies, I could see you with him and I could no longer justify, even to myself, my solitary confinement of you in a forest. I am sorry for this, sorry for the geese, whose concept I knowingly abused.
One stiff frosty evening not long before you left I brought coffee to your room and sat on the floor while you told me how the flight of the goose is the symbol for escaping continual rebirth, getting out of this agitated world. The goose flies, we break free at last without needing to come back and do this life again. Do you remember saying this? You pulled back the plunger and I saw a swirl of blood rise up in the needle, and then you closed your eyes and said that you could taste it in your mouth, and then that you were washed with warmth, and then you stood by the condensated window with your fingertips touching the pane until droplets ran down.
‘Anything is possible,’ you said, spreading your hand against the glass. ‘Ask me to do anything and I will be satisfied doing it.’ You regarded me with wide eyes and such deep stretching peace. Your hand slid down the pane and lay on the sill. You told me there was not one grain of fear or discomfort in you and nothing you could not or would not do, and do again, and love. You were made of light, were part of everything. Every beautiful detail of your childhood was right here to be lived again, you were burying Petras in the sand, you could feel the air on your back teeth. A most lovely sensation, the air there. Whatever you needed to do or be you could do or be. Nothing impeded. You had hit the ceiling and ripped through it, ripped through the gauze, there was light everywhere and you were it. Total acceptance of the way things were, gone any trace of desire to harm or bear a grudge, you were saying the word harm but it was a sound, the concept meant nothing to you any more. Instead of it you had the most visionary focus and patience, your beliefs came in colours and smells that overwhelmed the world with sense, logic and beauty, because there was nothing wrong, nothing to put right, no barriers, no emptiness. You were the goose in flight from the anxiousness and suffering of the world. I am the goose, you said with a shallow, euphoric smile as you rested your head against the wet pane. I am the goose!
I know you did not even notice when I left the room and went downstairs. There is nothing worse than witnessing somebody else’s salvation, Butterfly, when all you want is your own—when you were promised your own, when you grew up to believe there would be a great reward. And now, well, how easy it is to start living out one’s own reveries about the other, or worse still to project the future one thinks the other deserves, rather than the one she probably gets.
I have kept you lonely and baffled by the Upanishads. Your vegetables grow and their abundance reminds you of all the people you cannot share them with. I have given you a lake and not let you swim in it. Your video collection is very poor, even by your own standards; the geese fly but they are trapped in the screen and will never be free. Your beauty is for nobody to see. Your forest is nondescript when it comes down to it, just trees, all of them straight and none of them perfectly straight. I have given you food that makes you thinner. I have been untying the ropes on your charpoy one by one so that your sleep gets ever more uncomfortable, until you cannot sleep at all. I have given you one pen, and soon I will take it away. Then you will not even be able to keep a record of your life, and so you will be undone, my friend, you will be undone.
They have it that jealousy is the most corrosive of emotions and I have felt it corrode me and whittle me down to something dishonourable, this is the truth. I have looked at—not even taken from its box, just looked at—the lock of your hair and have been filled with heat that is as close to panic as to any other emotion I can name, the kind of panic one feels when one’s place is threatened. A survival response perhaps,
one that comes from seeing that one’s position in the world is not central or has been usurped.
I generally dislike this tendency in us to try to boil down everything we think, do and feel to a base instinct for survival, as if we are not responsible for our reactions, or as if we have no choice. But in this case perhaps it is true; we realise that somebody we love has loved someone else more, and we feel swiped aside like a skittle. Nothing essential holds me in place, all that I am is swiped aside and scuttled out of sight. For good or bad this is how I feel when I look at that lock of hair. I can’t touch it; I can only take out one of the ten-pack of cigarettes that I buy after the life-class, light up, stand back and inspect it from a cautious distance. Why did she? I think. Why did they? How did they? Was it worth it?
This is not something I very readily admit, and I will never tell Nicolas, but I went to stay at Mrs Ellis’ guest-house once. It wasn’t run by Mrs Ellis any more, but a man called John or Simon or Peter Ellis, who I assume was her son. I knew that Nicolas used always to rent the back room on the first floor because he mentioned once its view of the garden, which Mrs Ellis stocked with bird food. The roof of the portico, which was just below his window, was harangued (his word; this is the only time I ever remember him using it) with birds that landed on his sill. He kept his window shut. How could he complain? If he resented Mrs Ellis’ kindness towards birds he would have to resent it towards himself too.
I booked in advance and asked for this room. It was big and light. There was an iron-framed double bed against the left wall, badly made with sheets and blankets that pined for a hospital corner—an old pink, patchily bare woollen blanket, and pastel-striped pillows, a thick towel on the end of the bed that smelt of packaging. Nets at the window with worn lace, a tasselled lamp on a cheap, modern bedside table of plasticky pine, what would once have been a handsome wardrobe with broken fretwork above the doors, a light-blue carpet, a floral border on the woodchipped walls, a discoloured landscape print above the bed, a travel kettle with a limescaled spout, instant coffee, no teabags, no milk, three ashtrays (on the kettle tray, on the bedside table and on the windowsill), a dressing gown hanging on the back of the door as if somebody had left it there in error, a clean but not fresh smell.
Dear Thief: A Novel Page 19
