Four New Words for Love

by Michael Cannon

  ‘I can’t. Well I can’t have any more to drink. I’m still feeding Millie. I’ve had too much already. I feel like an arse, saying all that stuff about first and foremost...’

  Perhaps we’d given the impression we were leaving because they appeared with our jackets. I automatically took mine and we found ourselves out on the pavement by ten. Then there was that awful bit I always hate, when you both stand not knowing whether to risk an invitation. I stood it for three seconds, and was about to throw my hat into the ring when he beat me to it.

  ‘Would you like to come back to mine?’

  ‘I – I would. But I’ve got to think about Millie’s next feed and the babysitter. Why don’t we go back to mine?’

  He smiled. My heart took another espresso lurch. He lifted his hand and conjured a cab from over my shoulder, like a coin from behind an ear. I gave the address and we crossed the river again, back in the direction I’d come from, sitting forward to see the lights reflected in the water. It’s another sight, like sunset, I never tire of. But as I kept looking out I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before: the lighted window displays, and bars and restaurants growing scarcer as the spaces between buildings became the rule and not the exception, gaps filled with rubble and sprouting vegetation – broken teeth on the parade. And aside from the mosaic of lights from the high-rises, the only illumination is the sodium street lighting.

  In the time it took me to eat a meal the lift had broken. I’ve hauled a pram up the stairs without seeing them the way I was seeing them now, with him beside me. And there was the strata of smells, fried food, stale piss and God knows what. Ruth was on her feet at the first sound of the key in the lock, standing in the hall as if intercepting a burglar. She went all shy, as I did the introductions, so I pointed him towards the living room. The kitchen’s large enough for one person to stand in as long as you don’t open the cutlery drawer at the same time. She followed me in as I searched the fridge for something for him to drink. She stood, almost touching me, vibrating with suspense.

  ‘Isn’t it stupid, I never bought anything for him to drink. I never saw him back here. But then I suppose I must have, unconsciously. Why else the good underwear I wouldn’t mind being run over in?’

  ‘Who are you talking to?’

  ‘You. Me. I don’t know.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He’s here. That’s what happened. And he didn’t allow me to pay for anything. Maybe he thinks the more he forks out the better the chance of getting his end away. I could have told him to save his money.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why do you think? The last man who noticed me was Nick and it turned out he was only paying attention to himself. He,’ I point through the wall, ‘likes me.’ I pointed at my cleavage. ‘I’m taking every precaution science can devise, but it’s going to take a fucking earthquake to stop sex happening in this flat tonight.’

  ‘He might not want to have sex.’

  ‘Lack of experience aside, and no offence intended, unless you crawled out of a flower, when have you ever head of a man not wanting to have sex?’

  ‘You’re shouting. He might hear.’

  ‘I don’t care. I’m home. He’s here. I’m fed up being nervous and lonely. How was Millie? Hold on a minute.’ Underneath half-rotted broccoli I found part of Dad’s cache, three cans of cheap corner-shop lager. I wiped one clean, and delivered it with a spew of froth that swiped his groin. I absently wiped the mound of his tackle till I realised what I was doing, apologised and ran back to the kitchen. Once I’d heard Millie was fine I led Ruth to the door, picking up her stuff on the way.

  ‘I hope it goes all right. Come down with Millie tomorrow and see me.’

  I gave her the second impulsive kiss of the night through the closing door. If Lolly had asked me to come down she’d have demanded a blow-by-blow anatomical account of Simon’s technique. Ruth meant it in a misty lens, flowers and chocolates kind of a way. I leaned my back against the closed door and thought for a second about how some people are too nice for this world, took a deep breath, plumped up my tits and strode into the living room. He was crouching over my music collection, that I play on my stolen stereo, trying to hide the wet stain in his trousers. I sat on the sofa, waiting for him, posing myself to look sophisticated. Realising I lacked a drink to complete the effect, I stood just as he sat down to yet more catastrophic noises from the upholstery. This sounded structural. Remembering I couldn’t have another drink I put the kettle on. When I came back with a second beer I sat down as gently as I could. The sofa groaned again and gave up any pretence of lumbar support. We lolled together in the saggy bit. ‘Two frogs in a lily pad,’ I said. He just smiled. ‘Cosy,’ I said. His smiled widened. ‘Do you want me to open your beer?’

  ‘No thanks. I can pour it over my testicles all by myself.’

  He put his arm round me, taking advantage of the dynamics of the sofa, reaching over my shoulder and taking my breast in his right hand.

  ‘I see you’re employing the cinema technique tonight. A bit previous isn’t it?’

  ‘Are you complaining?’

  ‘No. There’s another one here too.’

  ‘I noticed.’

  I swivelled round to kiss him. With more skill than I’d have given him credit for he unclipped the front loader and slid his hands in. A few seconds later he slid them back out looking worried.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Leakage. I thought I’d given Millie enough but I seem to be producing more.’ He looked at my breasts as if they were water cannon, pointing at him. I had the strangest feeling that the romance of the moment had been lost and I had to do something, decisive and tender, right now, to get it back. The wail from the bedroom started right on cue.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said again, heaving myself up from the synthetic pit. He stood too and I left him for a moment, contemplating the corpse of the sofa. Millie was lying with her eyes wide open. She latched on like a docking spacecraft. I gave her a few minutes and then moved her across to the other. The kettle rose to a slow boil. It’s not electric. It’s a whistler, something you could identify in the pitch dark a hundred years from now. I was hoping she’d finish before it became too insistent, but I had to move through to turn off the noise. He obviously had the same thought. He caught me in the hall. My dress was still undone, my front-loader open. Millie was sucking rhythmically and there was a pearl of milk on the other nipple. For some reason she jerked away. Perhaps he thought that there was a single jet, a feeding syringe, not the sprinkler arrangement that showered the side of her face till she turned back and latched on with the same suddenness. He stopped dead and took all this in. I reached into the kitchen, shut off the noise, wiped her cheek and covered up. When I looked at him again he seemed morose, studying the patchy linoleum, a mosaic of off-cuts running back to the living room with its ridiculous furniture, and it was as if he was weighing up the pros and cons and calculating whether a fuck was worth the squalor and the consequences.

  ‘I – I’m sorry...’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry. This is all too much reality to take at one sitting.’

  ‘What do you want me to do, expose you in instalments? Maybe I could wheel the sofa into the shop and you could practice sitting on it a couple of times without the whole fucking ambience.’ The instant I swore I knew it was a mistake.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s not just...’ and he gestured in a vague way to indicate the whole fucking ambience. ‘Then there’s the baby...’

  ‘But there’s always been the baby. You knew about the baby when you asked me out.’

  ‘Yes... but. There’s knowing and there’s knowing. I didn’t really...’

  ‘I shouldn’t have sworn. I’m sorry. She’ll settle in a minute and we can both have some tea.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t have to keep apologising.’

  ‘I made a mistake. A mistake.’ He looked down, not wanting to meet my eye, and reached for his jacket at the same time.


  ‘Please. Don’t go. Not like this. If you still feel the same way in five minutes...’

  It didn’t stop him. All that supposed passion, dwindling to the offer of a cup of tea and a plea not to be left alone. He wouldn’t look back and said sorry at least twice more. In his hurry to go he accidentally slammed the front door. It didn’t catch and ricocheted open. I stood at the entrance, listening to his feet on the stairs, till I heard the bang of the lobby door echo up the stairwell. Millie fed throughout, her sucking amplified by the concrete acoustics.

  She fell asleep still latched on. I put her down and went to pick up the dead cans from the living room. I looked at the sofa. With the exception of Millie, the only good thing to have happened to me, this broken ugly thing seemed to epitomise my life to date. I wouldn’t let someone else’s opinion of me form my view of myself, but I’m looking around and I saw what he saw. Someone I thought me and Millie might just have had a future with looked at me and my situation, totalled the sum of my parts and decided that I add up to the square root of fuck all. And right now I can’t pretend to myself that it doesn’t hurt.

  PART 2

  When he wakes these mornings Christopher can feel the weight of his organs. When he has time to reflect, which is all the time he has, Christopher has contemplated the aggregate weight of his parts, and concluded that he is mediaeval. In that blissful moment, when the return to consciousness is unforced, Christopher is now obliged to take stock. He knows who he is but mentally reconnoitres to establish where he is. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. Thousands of previous mornings didn’t require orientation. Age has cast him frivolously adrift, a trailing fair-ground balloon grasped too late.

  He notes, with renewed surprise, that he has slept only on his allotted side, despite having the mattress to himself. Solitude has not yet accustomed him to the expanse. With an automatic gesture he retrieves his bedside glasses and the room swims into milky focus. He imagines himself on the other side of the gauze curtains, suspended above the dewy lawn, ascending like the truant balloon. And in that retreat the context of his diminishing world would be revealed, like a child entering his address in an exercise book: suburban street, near London, England, Britain, the World, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Universe.

  Movement is the order of the day. And it has become an order. The automatic transition of impulse to motion has gradually become a thing of the past. Now it requires the marshalling of forces. ‘And that’s another thing...’ Christopher says aloud to himself. The other thing is the previously invisible functions of his body which now clamour for attention. Previously Christopher considered his body, if he considered it at all, to be like a seaworthy ocean liner. Provisions were taken on board and the rest saw to itself. The boilers were stoked, the propellers turned, a multitude of things went on below decks, without supervision or consciousness, and the ship sailed stately on. Now the interior workings, with sighs, palpitations and eruptions, are becoming vociferous.

  With the momentum of habit Christopher locates his slippers, left parallel in readiness, slides his feet into them, and stands. Retrieving his dressing gown from the door hook he bends to tuck a heel into the flattened pile of one slipper, and bangs his head on the knob.

  ‘Fuck.’

  He is shocked. Where did that come from? ‘Fuck’ is not an item in his vocabulary, or Marjory’s, or the reactionary parts of the BBC he is accustomed to. It’s a word from the world Marjory took pains to exclude, and now it has intruded.

  He pads to the bathroom. Her merciless combination of reflective cabinet and fixed mirror give him back himself in unwanted detail. His hair lost its youthful vigour with its colour. Although thinning, Christopher’s hairline has remained adamant; he does not sport the liver spotted scalp of his contemporaries, and the impression of abundance is only debunked at close quarters. The Prussian haircuts of Marjory’s cajoling followed her to the grave. This new licence has nothing to do with vanity but absent-mindedness. Propelled in sleep by a mysterious static, the untrapped portion radiates in unpredictable permutations. A penumbra is cast by the overhead light. The flattened section, stuck round the vicinity of his ear, forms a curious crop circle, giving him the hallowed silhouette of a just struck match in a high cross-wind. He sits.

  Twenty years ago Marjory would tut disapproval from the bedroom at the torrential noise, as he pumped a steaming arc down the toilet each morning. It was a small but satisfying rebellion to direct the jet for maximum acoustics. And now, first thing, he sits to pee. There is now a hesitancy; his bladder has become inexplicably shy. After the first he is fine, but his last standing early morning attempt coaxed a trickle over his slippers. And that’s another thing... There is also the issue of his bowels. Previously the mere act of getting up set in train the motions. Now there are rumblings and issuings with little method and perilously brief forewarning; another rebellion below decks.

  He purges himself, cleans, flushes, stands. He lets the dressing gown and pyjama top fall to the ground. Full nudity in this hall of mirrors is too gruesome a prospect. He is only fully naked when condensation draws a veil. He runs a basin of warm water, lathers his face and pulls the shaving mirror on its extending bracket till his face shudders into view. He had been over-enthusiastic and looks like a bespectacled polar bear. He swivels the mirror to its magnified side and notes, with macabre curiosity, fissures, broken veins, the wattle, stubble emerging from the foam like soot on snow.

  He shaves in long practical sweeps, rinses the basin and climbs into the bath. Turning on the shower he luxuriates under the warm cone, after all these years still childishly pleased with the novelty of hot water on demand. Marjory has left a pumice stone, another small find, and he stands, stork like, forehead pressed against the tiles, water pleasurably cascading down his back while he files the scurf from his heels. He climbs out and dries himself before the condensation clears, collects the bundle of clothes and returns to the bedroom. An astringent closes the pores on his face. He dresses in a shirt and tie. Hound’s tooth trousers complement the leather carpet slippers. The dangling braces snap satisfactorily into place. Taking up two paddle-shaped brushes he tames his hair with a cursory glance in the mirror.

  ‘Splendid. Splendid.’

  This is repeated in a kind of litany as he goes downstairs to the kitchen. Contemplating the prospect of cereal or kipper, Christopher sits at the table and, stretching across, turns on the radio. It’s an old fashioned set, a vestige of earlier times, shared with his mother that he refused to relinquish in the onslaught of Marjory’s improvements. A circular dial controls a vertical stripe that drifts between wavebands calibrated with the names of foreign cities. He is floating in the ether between Budapest and Vladivostok, when a voice asserts itself through the static. It is the shipping forecast, a catalogue of wind velocities, compass directions and quadrilaterals of sea incomprehensible to him. An image floats into his mind: Hebridean seamen shrouded in gleaming oilskins, a pitching bow and tumultuous seas – and disappears as mysteriously as it arrived. A rich, plummy voice replaces the first, the comforting familiarity of received pronunciation, concentric ripples of civilisation with the BBC at its epicentre. A second and third image are conjured: ragged expats sweating in pith helmets; sophisticates on a colonial veranda, sipping sundowners beneath mesmerising revolutions of a slow fan. It’s the World Service. It’s the news. It’s five thirty a.m.

  ‘Splendid. Splendid,’ Christopher says as his forehead makes slow contact with the table, and he immediately falls asleep.

  * * *

  A list of stock-market prices, delivered in deadpan monotony, awaken him. For the second time in five hours he has to locate himself. He looks at the clock. Ten fifteen. The image of a kipper pops up in his imagination like the displayed price in an old-fashioned till. His timing is perfection. The butter melts into the kipper, curling beneath the grill, as the poached egg is scooped from the water. He completes the ensemble with toast and a pot of Earl Grey.

 
Fifteen minutes later he is walking in the direction of the newsagent. A cluster of small shops still face one another across the High Street, embattled remnants of the village purveyors he knew as a child, till London came knocking. The bell announces his arrival. He prefers a less obtrusive entrance. Scanning the newspapers his eyes are drawn to the upper shelf. There is a young woman whose breasts defy gravity. His scrutiny is curious, not prurient. Even the Edwardian corsetry that pre-dated his mother wouldn’t provide the superstructure for this display. Is it nutrition? The bell rings again. From his peripheral vision he is aware that his glance vies with another. George Coleman is studying the same detail with quite a different expression. He turns to look at Christopher in a sudden exchange of grubby complicity. The glance is gone as soon as it arrives. Christopher turns away. He doesn’t like George Coleman and feels contaminated by implication. He buys his paper and retreats, exchanging a cursory nod with George as the bell rings him out. Both know this is an association George is keener on than Christopher. Christopher imagines that George imagines some fraternity of louche outings.

  The kitchen tap has developed a persistent slow drip, a water torture to calibrate suburban afternoons. Despite lacking all practical skills, Christopher takes a detour into the ironmongers, regretting his decision as the aproned figure turns to serve him. The young man of contagious gusto is intermittently replaced by the old man of corrosive cynicism. Christopher has seen enough cynicism in his life. He came here more for the pleasure of the chat than the need for washers. Enthusiasm is a draught. And there’s another reason why he dislikes the old man: he’s a veteran bigot, who treats Christopher with the reverence of a belligerent drill-sergeant for an officer who exemplifies the callousness he’s trying to instil. God knows, Christopher has given him no cause. He shares none of his opinions, but that doesn’t seem to matter. It’s a trend Christopher notices in those around him who have reached a similar age: they presuppose a common pool of shared prejudices.