‘Oh God, she didn’t tell you about that, did she?’
‘Nice girl, huh! And before we go any further let’s get one thing straight, Leo. I do not, have not and will never fancy you.’
Leo was stunned. They were at the bus stop outside Charlie’s door; the rain was torrential. He dropped his head and turned back to the flat. Hannah pulled him back, spun him round and stared coldly at him.
‘Aren’t you going to ask how I am?’
‘No.’
‘Thank you for asking. I’m not great, Leo, in fact I would say I am positively miserable.’ She clenched her fists around his wet collar. ‘My dad is ill. They don’t know what it is, but he can’t eat.’ Her eyes welled up. ‘When Mum died I had a recurring nightmare that something would happen to my dad. Did you know that the partners of people who die of cancer are more likely to get it? Now they haven’t said it’s cancer but I can smell it, Leo. He’s dying.’ She burst into tears.
Leo gently took her hands from his jacket and hugged her. A speeding lorry drove through a little pool that had swelled up by the side of the road and sprayed them with water. Leo cursed. The world was full of stupid lorry drivers.
‘Let’s go back in and talk, shall we?’ he suggested.
‘No,’ she insisted. ‘If we stay here we’ll just get depressed. I need to let my hair down. “Dance and forget,” I remember my dad saying that after Mum died. He’d put some music on really loud and we’d dance around the house to cheer ourselves up.’
‘Did it work?’
‘Only while we were dancing.’
They arrived soaked at a small semi-detached house in Kilburn, notable only for the bedspreads hanging in the windows as makeshift curtains. A deep repetitious thud rocked the house. Hannah rang the doorbell but no one replied. She lifted the letter box to look and a whiff of smoke wafted into the damp air.
‘Don’t you just love student parties?’ she said.
They made their way down a path that led past the side of the house to the back door. It was open and they stepped into a kitchen with a muddy floor. They passed a group of students necking beer and yelling above the music. Hannah dragged Leo deeper into the throbbing heat of the party, through knots of drunken girls and lairy lads. She headed for the living room where a mass of drug-sodden revellers swayed trance-like to the beat. Hannah furrowed her way to the centre of the dance floor and joined the horde, injecting an energy that enlivened those around her. Leo backed up to the wall and watched. He was still smarting from her comments. After a while he wandered into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of wine. But as he brought the cup to his lips he was knocked from behind and spilt the wine all over his jeans. He swore and turned sharply to see who was responsible. It was Stacey.
‘Stacey,’ Leo exclaimed, ‘look where you’re . . . Stacey, what’s wrong?’
There were tears rolling down her cheeks. She pushed past him and out of the back door without so much as a word. Leo followed her out.
‘Stacey, Stacey, are you all right?’ He grabbed her arm and pulled her back. ‘Talk to me, Stace, what’s wrong?’
‘It’s Roberto,’ she sobbed, ‘he’s in there with some bimbo. He was getting off with her right in front of me.’
‘Oh God, that’s awful. What’s he playing at? That’s not like him.’
‘Oh yes, it bloody is. He refuses to be faithful for philosophical reasons. He’s testing me, he wants me to be like him. It’s not the first time. Well I’ve had enough of it. I’ve tried to put up with it but I’m sick of it, he’s making a bloody fool of me. I’m going home, I never want to see him again.’ She pulled a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose.
‘Shall I walk you home?’ Leo offered.
‘No, it’s all right, I need to be alone for a bit,’ she said, and scurried off down the alleyway.
Leo wandered back into the house to see if he could find Roberto. In the corridor he bumped into Chris, a skinny rodent of a man who he knew vaguely from university. After initial pleasantries the conversation turned to Eleni. He was having to shout over the music but he was glad of someone to talk to. They sat down on the stairs and Leo explained that he had been trying to keep her memory alive through his research into love.
‘I’ve kept this notebook, you see, and at first I just made random entries, but now I’m beginning to see a pattern. I’m beginning to realize that everything from the smallest particle, through the migrations of animals to the very movement of the stars is governed by one fundamental emotion . . .’
It was the sort of monologue to which his friends had become drearily accustomed. Chris stood up abruptly and said: ‘You know what, mate? You’re really screwed up. We’re at a party, for Christ’s sake. I really think you need help, all your friends are saying it but no one dares tell you because they feel sorry for you, Leo. You need therapy. Honestly, it will do you good. I’m the wrong guy to talk to about Eleni. I really am. I can’t help you. So if you would excuse me . . .’ and he walked off. Leo felt annoyed with himself, he kept forgetting that there was no point talking about Eleni. He heard Roberto’s voice behind him, and turned to see the elegant Italian walking down the stairs.
‘Hello, Leo,’ Roberto said cheerfully.
‘Roberto, what’s going on? I’ve just seen Stacey . . .’ Leo began, then halted as he noticed Camilla coming down behind Roberto.
‘Camilla, this is Leo.’
‘I remember you from the class,’ she smiled.
Leo looked at Roberto fiercely.
‘It’s all right,’ Roberto said. ‘Camilla knows. Don’t worry about Stacey, Leo, she’s just jealous. She’ll get over it, it’s a petty emotion. So tell me, Leo, how are you?’ He offered his hand. Leo shook it half-heartedly but made no reply. ‘Oh come on, Leo, the world is here to be enjoyed. Don’t be angry with me.’
‘What about hurting other people’s feelings?’ Leo protested.
Roberto looked at him intently. ‘I’m not hurting anyone’s feelings, it’s her choice if she wants to be upset. Look, if you’ve understood anything of what I’ve tried to teach you then you would know that everything is equal, nothing on this planet is more important than anything else. We should love everything equally. I think Camilla agrees with me.’
Camilla nodded.
‘But is no one special to you?’ Leo asked.
‘Everyone is special. We are all part of the same unity.’ Roberto smiled, and then he did something utterly extraordinary. He took Leo’s head in his hands and kissed him forcibly on the lips. Leo was so shocked it took him a moment to realize what was happening. Camilla giggled nervously. Eventually Leo managed to push Roberto off.
‘What the hell are you doing, Roberto?’ he stammered.
‘I’m proving a point.’
‘What point?’ Leo said angrily.
‘There is no such thing as fidelity, there is not even such a thing as homosexuality or heterosexuality. These are just concepts, man-made constructs. They limit our infinite potential. Like I said, the universe is here for us to enjoy. If this is heaven, there is no judgement day. We should feast on our senses and feast on each other. Bodily pleasure should be derived from any and every source. I love you, Leo, like I love Stacey, like I love Camilla.’ Roberto turned and kissed Camilla.
‘Yeah, and you love me like you love the fucking wallpaper. Is this where you’ve been leading me?’ Leo remonstrated bitterly.
‘Absolutely,’ Roberto said triumphantly.
Leo found himself alone in a small box room at the top of the house. He had escaped up the stairs overcome by a sudden wave of revulsion and panic. He switched the light off and slumped on a pile of coats, clutching his stomach. He felt betrayed. He heard a moth battering itself against the paper lampshade, disturbed by the darkness, unable to settle. He tried to breathe but his chest felt constricted. His head was fire, flames licked the inside of his scalp, turning his thoughts to ash. Now for the first time he saw that he had been completely deluding himself. T
hese past few months he had been sliding into madness without even realizing it. Eleni was gone and everyone knew it but him. The dead only lived in the minds of lunatics. The kiln in his head was unbearable, a fireball rampaged through him incinerating every image of Eleni, and snuffing out his fledgling theories. And when the furnace had burnt itself out there was nothing. He was hovering in a void, but instead of feeling immense as Roberto had suggested, he felt alone and powerless. Ahead of him was an eternity of emptiness. The moth had found the windowpane and pounded its fragile body against the glass until, exhausted, it found a resting place in the shadows. They sat in the little room together, both crushed.
They were disturbed by a sudden blast of light as the door swung open and two entwined bodies burst through. The couple were so involved with each other that they did not notice Leo and the moth sitting in the dark. The man kicked the door shut behind him and pushed his woman up against it. His face pressed against hers in lust. His hand reached down between her legs and hitched up her skirt. It was then that the woman felt another presence in the room. She screamed, ‘There’s someone in here.’
It was Hannah. She opened the door, and as the light burst in she saw Leo staring at her. She did not hear the small explosion in his heart, nor the quiet escape of hope that leaked from his veins, but the moth took off and headed for the light.
‘Sorry, I was just getting my coat,’ he said as he got to his feet and left, without a second look or a coat.
When he returned home he picked up his notebook in a rage, took it downstairs and threw it out on to a pile of rubbish by the bus stop.
The following day Leo called his GP and got the number of a bereavement counsellor, but immediately the woman’s voice put him off. If marzipan could speak it would sound like Mrs Charlotte Philips. Her vowels were annoyingly long. Her comments were dripping with syrupy professional sympathy. She spoke too softly and was over-reassuring as though she was dealing with a very sick child.
‘How aaaaawful,’ she said repeatedly. ‘You must feel tehhhhrrible.’
Charlotte Philips was one of those women who had been through ‘the trauma of bereeeeavement’ herself and had dedicated her life to helping others. Was this really what Leo needed? He resisted it. Nevertheless she lured him into her sticky trap and cudgelled an appointment out of him, the prospect of which hung over his head like a curse. He had nightmares of lying naked on her sugary couch with his breastbone peeled open and all his internal organs on display while Mrs Marzipan Philips spread treacle over them with a butcher’s knife trying to make him ‘feeeel’ better. He couldn’t go through with it. He waited until after six one day before calling back in the hope that he could cancel on an answering machine. The phone rang for a while before it was answered.
‘Hello,’ a tiny voice said.
‘Ah, hello.’ Leo could barely mask his disappointment. ‘Can I speak to Mrs Philips?’
‘I’m three and a half,’ the voice said with great pride.
‘Are you?’
‘Yes, three and a half. How old are you?’
‘Older than I was yesterday . . . Can you pass on a message to Mummy?’ Leo continued rather hopefully. ‘Could you tell her . . .’
‘My name’s Jenny, what’s yours?’
‘Mr Deakin.’
‘Daddy says Mummy works with loonies. Are you a loony?’
Leo hesitated, ‘Look, Jenny, can I speak to your mummy?’
‘Mummy, Mummy, Mr Deak’s on the phone. I think he’s a loony.’
Leo could hear Mrs Philips in the background. ‘Daaarling, please don’t use that word.’
‘Are you going to make him better with questions, Mummy?’ was the last thing Jenny said before the telephone was snatched from her tiny hands and stuffed with fondant, long-vowelled apologies.
When he told Mrs Philips he wanted to cancel she was convinced that it must be because he was ‘sooo tehhhhrribly upset’. She said it was very common for people to cancel sessions because they were frightened, but really they had nothing to fear. Bereavement counselling was not like analysis, the source of the depression was known, there was no need to investigate the client’s childhood or intimate relations. It was merely an opportunity for Leo to discuss what he was feeling right now with someone who had experience of those feelings. He would be reassured, she said, to learn that nearly all those who grieved follow a similar cycle of panic attacks, anger, pining and searching.
‘Searching?’ Leo heard himself ask.
‘It is a restless drive to find the deceased.’
She explained how it was normal for bereaved people to lose all interest in humdrum daily activities while they directed all their attention to locating the lost person. Adopted children seek out their real parents, widows sit by the chair that their partner used to sit in or obsessively tend their grave. Some people catch sight of their loved ones in the street or think they hear them every time the stairs creak. Many feel that the deceased continues to be present in their lives, they may even talk to them. They will interpret unusual natural phenomena as signs from beyond the grave.
‘All this is part of the process and I am here to affirm your experiences. These symptoms pass. You have to go through the darkness to find the light,’ she said with zeal.
Leo dreaded the passing of the ‘symptoms’ of bereavement. At least the darkness held Eleni in its shadows; the light with its piercing clarity might reveal that she had gone for good, chased even from his dreams. Yes, it was reassuring to know that millions of others wandered the streets with angels at their shoulders, that the background hum of the city was actually the sound of people chatting to the dead, and that all day codified messages of love were being transmitted through rustling leaves and creaking stairs to the waiting ears of the lonely, but Mrs Philips’s cure was worse than the illness. This was Leo’s constituency and he had no desire to escape it. It would be treachery.
‘Let yourself be helped, Leo,’ she said.
He assured her that he was fine but he could hear the hollowness in his own voice.
‘If you ever change your mind I’m only a phone call away.’
22
LEO HAD CAUGHT HUNDREDS OF FALLING LEAVES IN autumn, saved hundreds of souls. He had placed each leaf between the pages of the books on Charlie’s shelf and forgotten about them. Every so often, when Charlie was reading, he would turn a page and a leaf would drift to the floor. He always picked it up and put it back out of respect for the lunacy of his friend.
Charlie returned home from work to find Leo’s bags packed and their distraught owner picking painstakingly through the books. He had placed the leaves in pairs on the carpet.
‘What are you doing, Leo?’
‘I thought the leaves might be lonely in the books.’ Leo was trembling, blinking nervously, ‘Have you read Plato?’
‘No,’ Charlie replied. He took off his coat and sat down on the carpet, alarmed by Leo’s strange behaviour.
‘He wrote this story about how Zeus made these strange creatures with two heads and four arms and legs. They were always happy and had no inhibitions. And the world was full of laughter. But Zeus was having a bad time because his wife Hera was pissed off with him. They argued all day, and at night he couldn’t sleep because his creatures were laughing so much. It got so bad that one day Zeus lost it and threw a load of thunderbolts at them. His creatures were split in two and scattered to the four corners of the world. Plato says that since that day the earth has been covered with restless one-headed creatures searching for their other half.’ Leo’s voice trembled as he spoke.
Charlie was unnerved, ‘And the leaves?’
‘Don’t you understand, Charlie? Each leaf was a soul in freefall. I caught them before they hit the ground and now around the world hundreds of lonely people are in suspension awaiting their fate. I’m making matches for them, putting Zeus’s creatures back together.’
Charlie looked in bewilderment at the leaves that Leo had lovingly put together. Beech
, sycamore, oak and chestnut were arrayed in autumn tapestry across the floor. None of it made sense to him. Leo picked up another book from the shelf above Charlie’s bed and rifled through the pages. Two maple leaves fell out and he put them together on the carpet. Then he went back to the shelf for the next book, but his hands were shaking and he dropped it on the bed. He blinked a couple of times in quick succession, as if he were not accustomed to the light, and reached down to the book. He took it in both hands and flicked through it carefully. Nothing. Another book revealed five leaves. Charlie found this sad and compulsive ritual difficult to bear. He got up and wrapped his arms around his friend. ‘I’m worried about you, Leo.’
‘Nobody caught my leaf. I am lost,’ Leo muttered desolately.
‘What’s happened, why are you saying these things? Don’t give up. You’re going through a bad patch, but it’s just a phase. It will pass,’ Charlie reassured him.
Leo shook his head emphatically. ‘You don’t know how dreadful this is . . . I thought it would get easier to bear but the pain grinds on . . . it’s relentless. It feels like it’s going to last for ever. I’ve tried, Charlie, honestly I have. I’ve tried to live normally but I can’t escape this weight. I haven’t got the strength to keep looking for Eleni. I’m broken. I hate myself like this, but I can’t find my way back and the worst thing is that no one understands . . . who am I meant to talk to?’
Charlie was stung, he knew he was at fault; he had never really sat down and talked to Leo about what was going on in his troubled head. The subject was too difficult to broach. A gulf had opened up between them and now his best friend was drowning. He looked at Leo’s bags by the door. There was still a small spot of blood on the top of his rucksack from the crash in Ecuador.
‘Why are you packed?’ Charlie asked.
‘I don’t want to be a burden to you any more. I’ll be off when I’ve sorted this out,’ Leo said bleakly, opening another book.
‘You’re not a burden to me.’
‘That’s not what Hannah said.’ Leo stared at him accusingly.
Random Acts of Heroic Love Page 19
