She considered herself overweight as a teenager and has been obsessed with thinness ever since. At the time she saw herself as massive, with tree-trunk thighs and double chins. But recently, looking through some old photographs, she was surprised to see that the girl in the photos, nearly always trying to evade the camera, was not plump, or even chubby. At worst she might be described as sturdy; perhaps busty. Not fat, though. Nowhere near fat.
And yet the misconception had governed her life; perhaps still does. At college she verged on becoming anorexic. In her first job, as a junior in the publicity department of a large publishing house, she skipped lunches and then sometimes gorged at home, and sometimes vomited afterwards. But when she went freelance she left all that behind her. She was run off her feet, and despite the endless meals and parties she never put on an ounce. It was burned off by the relentless pressure of keeping up with it all, and by the nervous energy needed to present her public face.
The face. The permanent bloody perfect public face. That was what perplexed her when she met him and they became close. She felt that it was obvious to anyone why someone like her would be attracted by someone like him, with his talent and his depth and his moody complexities. But why would he be interested in her? She accepted the label of media tart – that was what she was, and unashamedly so. But surely he wasn’t taken in by the bubbles and the smile? Surely he could see right through to the vacancy behind them? She could only believe that he did, and that he saw even further than she could see, to where her true self lay bound and gagged and drugged. And if he saw it and liked it enough to stay around, then maybe she should try to discover it herself.
So with the help of her analyst, she set about rescuing it, and throughout the whole long, arduous process he listened and appeared to understand. He agreed, enthused, advised, encouraged, supported. She was right to undertake the search for her soul; it was the only really important part of a human being. Everything else could be reduced to survival tools and window-dressing, he said. The body was the scaffolding from which the soul is suspended, and as such it was largely irrelevant.
So what was all this about now? Could she have been wrong about him all along?
{10}
Over time he lost his gaunt appearance and developed what he called a beer belly. Although he still hated parties he learned to put up with them, because he understood the necessity of networking, and he no longer planted himself in the quietest corner but stood more centrally, or even circulated. His confidence increased exponentially, and if he never lost his dislike of media types and his disdain for the ‘arty’ scene, he never let it show.
When The Turf Shed came out he was rewarded for his pains by full review coverage and another round of interviews and feature articles. One critic, writing in a prestigious Irish poetry journal, compared him unfavourably with Seamus Heaney and accused him of constructing a mythical ‘Oirish’ childhood to cash in on the current publishing hunger for ‘barefoot misery’. His admirers told him it was rubbish and he would be best to ignore it. He did his best to follow their advice, but it wasn’t as easy as it sounded.
He walks north, through London’s strung-out villages, each with their own banks and post offices, shops and supermarkets, pubs and restaurants. He passes a Japanese place that was ‘in’ a few years ago, but when he catches the cooking smell outside it he is reminded not of the food he ate there, but of the drinks he had in its parchment-and-bamboo waiting area. A few doors down, the legs of a prostrate drunk extend across the pavement. He crosses the street and lights another cigarette.
It is after ten, but that is still early for London and he feels safe in the bright high streets and the quiet residential hinterlands in between them. The black wool coat he bought in New Bond Street last year was an inspired choice. Anyone in the know would recognise its designer elegance as soon as they were close enough, but to a passer-by it would look quite casual, even slightly shabby. So although he keeps his eyes open, he does not fear attack. But what he is carrying within him does not feel so safe.
That Irish critic still haunts him. Twelve years on, the words still sting, and he is not such a fool that he doesn’t know why. The title poem was one of those he now wishes he had withheld. It contains a lie at its very heart. It was his publisher (who also acted as editor, publicist and distributor for his small press), who suggested the change. His reservation was reasonable. The wood shed was too firmly associated in educated minds with Stella Gibbons and Cold Comfort Farm, and the power of the poem and of the whole collection would have been compromised by the comic echoes. He agreed and made the change, even though his family had never burned turf, but ash and beech cut from their own extensive woodlands. It hadn’t troubled him at all at the time. No one would ever know, after all. But it now seems to him that the lie was a road sign pointing to greater lies within.
He passes a tube station and thinks, for the first time, of turning back. But the shock returns and the memory of what awaits him there, and he continues to walk, still heading north. In any case, he is struck by a strange sense that he is heading towards home and not away from it. He tries to analyse the feeling, but it is elusive. It is certainly not a blissful childhood hearthrug-and-hugs sense of home, and nor is it his current sofa-nest-and-popcorn one. It’s a darker feeling; a primal, disturbing, instinctive kind of longing. For what, though? Death? No, not death. Nothing as dramatic and final as that.
A few drops of rain fall tentatively, the advance party for a deluge, checking that the sky corridors are clear. They are, and the downpour follows. He steps into the doorway of an all-night supermarket and lights another cigarette, keeping the hand that is holding it outside and upturned, reminding him of how he and his brother used to conceal their smokes like that, in case their parents happened along.
Maybe ‘lies’ is too strong. The poems are fine. They are good. Everybody said so, bar the one.
A security guard inside the shop is staring at him. He turns to face the street and takes another drag of his cigarette. The poems are as well crafted as any of his earlier work. Better, perhaps, because he is constantly working and perfecting his technique. Yes. They are good. Technically, they are just about perfect.
But he knows, deep down, that this is all whitewash, designed to conceal a truth he is unwilling to face. He glances over his shoulder. The guard is still watching him. He throws the cigarette into the street, where it sends out a trail of sparks like a small firework, then he turns and goes into the shop. He strides towards the guard in a confrontational way but then averts his gaze and walks straight past him and in among the shelves. He picks up a bottle of water, and at the counter he buys a third packet of cigarettes.
{11}
Looking back on it, she can see that her first move towards defining her true self was not exactly revolutionary. He laughed when she told him about No Sandwiches, and at the time it bothered her. It’s easy now to see that it was not the great leap into darkness and chaos that she expected it to be, but it was a small step forward and all she was capable of at the time.
The idea grew out of her increasing disenchantment with the sandwich as a lunchtime staple. In the years since she had gone freelance she had eaten lunch out nearly every day, and nearly always in the centre of London. Some clients required fancy restaurants with proper meals, but more often than not her midday meetings took place over a sandwich, and her non-meeting lunches consisted of a sandwich on the run. Despite the changes they had gone through with the introduction of fancy breads, there was still no disguising what they were. And she was well and truly sick of them.
So she came up with the concept of a café that had both eat-in and takeaway sections, and was open from mid-morning to office closing time, and that didn’t sell sandwiches. Instead it would offer a huge range of delicious alternatives: pasties, pastry rolls with a variety of fillings, quiches, spanakopita, Spanish omelettes, Indian and Middle Eastern snacks. The only bread would be pita to go with dips, and organic brown roll
s to go with the soup.
It took far more research and organisation to get off the ground than she had expected, and there was a time when winding down the old business and winding up the new one overlapped and almost made her ill with exhaustion. There was consternation in the publishing world when word got out that she was giving up, and offers came in that she found all but impossible to refuse. A film star she had worshipped since she was a child was bringing out an autobiography. A writer of comic fiction whom she loved touring with was launching a new series.
Jobs like that might well have elevated her to another level of prestige and income. She wavered, but although he had laughed at No Sandwiches, he was backing her up now. It wasn’t only about providing this new option for the office crowd and, hopefully, making a shed-load of money out of it. It was about her and her life; about stepping off the superstar merry-go-round and freeing up some time to get to know herself. So she resisted the irresistible and forged ahead with the new project.
She had never learned to cook and knew nothing about food, so she consulted those who had and did. With painstaking determination, she tracked down the people who could produce what she wanted. No food was to be prepared on the premises, but neither was it to be delivered in tubs or buckets. There was no plastic allowed, because she knew what happened to the taste of any food that came into prolonged contact with it. The only exception was the takeaway cutlery, for which she could find no affordable alternative. The food was stored and displayed in glass and pottery and kept there until it was sold on plates or in cardboard containers. He said she ought to call it No Plastic and compromise on the sandwich ban. He couldn’t see what was wrong with sandwiches anyway. He liked them. But he supported her wholeheartedly, and when she was run off her feet he took over some of the donkey work, like supervising the decorators and trudging through the endless volumes of health and safety regulations.
The first few weeks were touch and go. There were teething problems with some of the suppliers and a couple of the young people she employed were all fingers and thumbs and would have been better suited to working on a construction site. Another one couldn’t grasp the concept of lunch-sized portions and created havoc with both the balance of quantities and with the future expectations of customers. Of which, initially at least, there weren’t very many. No Sandwiches was, as he had pointed out, based on nothing more scientific than her own personal tastes, and for a while it looked as though she might have made a dreadful error of judgement. She was alone in her eccentric preferences. Everyone else was clearly quite happy with sandwiches, and her attempt to rock the boat was a disastrous waste of money and effort.
It was her old industry that came to her rescue. Twenty years’ worth of business acquaintances don’t go away over- night, and she was still getting dozens of calls and emails every day. She told them all what she was doing now, and some of them came to check it out and found that they liked it. There was no problem getting a table whenever they came in. The food was excellent and the place was quiet, and this was a combination that people in publishing valued. Soon the customers were arriving, and not just any customers, but the right kind of customers. Word began to get around. No Sandwiches was the new ‘in’ place to eat lunch. She was up and running again, and what’s more, it was just the beginning.
{12}
After that warning from the doctor he took to cycling, and over the summer he came up this road nearly every day on his way to Parliament Fields and the Heath. But he has never walked these streets at night before. Not any further than that Japanese restaurant. He has the sense again of going home, and of home being an uncomfortable and challenging place, but one, nevertheless, where he must go. But it isn’t easy. All his senses are on red-raw alert, and he knows that in some way he is ignoring the warnings of the gods and striding on to challenge them.
And why not? What else is left for him to do, now that his wife has been transformed into a hag? It feels like their realm, this sudden transmogrification. She left him a beautiful woman and has returned to him a crone. He always knew. She never deceived him about this.
And yet, somehow, he didn’t know. For all his powers of imagination, he has never envisaged her as she appeared to him that evening. He has always believed what his eyes told him, not his mind. He has been entrapped by her womanly arts, like a spider in the jaws of its deadly mate. His train of thought offers him a nice bone of resentment to gnaw on, but he stops it there anyway. It is nonsense. They didn’t come together on Bondi Beach or at a Hollywood meat market. They met as mature adults. Their relationship is not based upon such superficialities, but on mutual respect. So why should it matter? Why should the colour of her hair make a difference?
It does.
He passes a corner pub. A man and a woman burst out of it, laughing, ducking beneath the rain. The man is wearing a linen jacket, which flies apart as he walks and shows the leanness of his body beneath a soft, white shirt. He has a set of car keys in his hand. The woman is raven-haired, wrapped in a long tweed coat. She takes his arm, tripping along beside him, hurrying from the rain, still laughing. For an instant the man’s eyes catch his, and the look in them says, Aren’t you envious, mate.
As he walks on he understands that he has invented it, this silent exchange, and he sees why he has. It has provided him with the answer to his question. Because he is proud to be seen with her. She draws attention for all kinds of reasons, but her looks are high on the list of them. She has a great body for a woman of her age. She doesn’t dress provocatively but she has a unique sense of style; a casual elegance which turns heads. But who will look at her now? He tries to remember other grey-haired women in their circle of friends and acquaintances. He spends some time thinking about this, and lights a cigarette to help him concentrate. Are there any? He can’t think of any. Does that mean that there aren’t any or that the ones there are have made no impression upon him?
So is that it? Is that the basis of their relationship? The whole fifteen years’ worth? The fact that she looks good on his arm?
The rain is coming down harder. He needs to get out of it but he daren’t go into a pub. So he ducks into the next takeaway he passes and orders a doner kebab and a black coffee. There are no tables, but there is a ledge running along one wall with stools pushed under it, so he eats there. The kebab is greasy and slimy with mayonnaise and some kind of translucent red goo. He isn’t hungry anyway, and neither the smells nor the tastes produce the appetite he knows he ought to have. But eating the food and drinking the soapy coffee is the price of shelter from the rain, so he takes as much time over it as he can.
He is still severely rattled. His heart is going at an alarming rate. He feels its uneven rhythm in his throat, as unwelcome as a neighbour learning the drums and as difficult to ignore. He tries to listen to the conversations going on behind him at the counter, but his internal dialogue is too demanding and soon reclaims his attention.
He can’t accept the conclusion he has reached about the nature of the relationship because to do so would be to accept an image of himself that he finds unpalatable. If his interest in her is solely based upon the augmentation of his ego, then he has become the kind of man he despises, concerned only with attracting admiration and envy. He will not accept that judgement upon himself. He declares, silently, that he loves her whatever she looks like, but when the image of her white hair returns to his mind he recoils as strongly as ever.
He asks for water and soaks a wad of paper napkins, cleans his hands and face. He drops the soggy mess into the remains of his food and puts the lot into a bin beside the door. Outside, the rain has slackened. He stands for a moment, looking in both directions. He wants to go back to the house and be comfortable and dry, but he finds he can’t. He needs to keep digging until he comes to the bottom of this, and finds the real reason for his reaction to what she has done. And in a strange way, this realisation gives him new heart. It reminds him of his trade and why it has chosen him. He has never gone for the
easy option of side-stepping life’s challenges and turning on the television. He has always squared up to them and worked to dissect them, and define their nature, and present his findings to anyone with courage enough to read them. That, for him, is the art of poetry.
As he turns his steps towards the north again he takes out his cigarettes, but decides against smoking one and puts them back in his coat pocket. His heart is still frightening him, thudding away; the grim reaper limping behind like a teasing child. So strongly does this image strike him that he turns abruptly in the empty street and yells, ‘Fuck off!’
And he sees in himself the archetype of the Irish down-and-out in London, beyond the point of redemption, screaming at ghosts. And he sees, in the same moment, that he really might have ended up like that if it hadn’t been for her.
{13}
She pulls up his number on her mobile phone, but she doesn’t ring it. He has walked out because he doesn’t want to talk to her. He doesn’t want to discuss this thing she has done. If she phones he might not answer, and if he does answer, what will she say? There is no point in asking him to come home, because if he wanted to do that he would do it. So would she express her anger at him? Call him a superficial bastard? Tell him he can’t handle the truth? Isn’t that why she fell in love with him in the first place, precisely because he could handle the truth? Look it in the eye, call it by its real name, reveal it to the world in his poetry?
Could it be that he has changed? Lately he hasn’t been working, or at least, he hasn’t been working on his own writing, and she knows it bothers him. It occurs to her that perhaps he has lost it; that ability to see beneath the surface of things. And if he has, how does that affect the way she feels about him? Would she still love him if he gave it up? Threw in the towel? Stated that he’d had enough of looking into the underworld and intended to opt for the easy life?
Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 Page 6
