'I did. You have it.'
'Well, I have the doubt, that's a start.' I paused for a second. 'What if I have no more than a frail talent, one of those little rosebuds that never opens and blooms?'
'Frail talent,' she repeated. 'Don't think about it. Just do what you do and see where it takes you – which I know you're going to do anyway.'
The waiter returned to our table. Did we want coffee? Yes, we did want coffee. And, no, we didn't want dessert. Lizzie decided to order another glass of wine and my phone vibrated.
14
Tunnel of Love
Texts buzzed back and forth, brief and business-like, with occasional kisses. Tom was at a meeting to discuss the refugee situation in Syria, and was going to be late. He had been following the developments and left the papers folded back on articles he wanted me to read. It was all so depressing. War is like the seasons, sunrise and sunset, an endlessly repeating cycle.
We met as the sun dipped behind the trees in Battersea Park, the bare branches moving on the darkening night like the arms of people watching some moving event. There was an old-fashioned funfair with music grinding from tin speakers, the Everly Brothers, Elvis, Buddy Holly, their songs scored with jangling chords and optimism. The air smelled of hot dogs and candy floss.
The sky turned black and the fairy lights created a bubble under which we were a part of London's M&M's bag of humanity, families with bright-eyed concentration as they set out on the quest of pleasure. Children spiralled down the helter-skelter on coconut mats; horses with mournful faces charged at full gallop on the carousel; the big dipper shuddered over silver rails.
We stood at the side of a stall where two couples were throwing bean bags at a pyramid of cans stacked on a shelf trying to win a panda with a cute face. The showman leaned over and pointed at me.
'Come here, come here a minute,' he said. 'I'll tell you what, darling, you've got a lucky face.'
He dropped two sets of three bags in front of us as we took a step closer.
'Don't know about a lucky face,' said Tom. 'You look like the panda.'
'What, an endangered species?'
He glanced back again at the stuffed toy sitting there with its cockeyed smile and legs stretched out. 'What are we going to do with it?' he said.
'That's like asking what you are going to do with your winnings when you buy a lottery ticket.'
'You have to think positive. I'll put it on my cot. Then, I'll think of you when I go to bed at night,' he said, and it reminded me that he would soon be leaving.
'We've been invited to have dinner with Lizzie, a friend of mine,' I told him.
'Best news I've had all day. I've been dying to meet some of your friends.'
'Her boyfriend's something in Special Forces, a sergeant, mad by all accounts.'
'Sounds even more interesting.'
The stallholder butted in. 'Well, Lucky Lady, you going to have a go or what?' he said, and I admired his persistence as I went for my purse.
'I'll get it,' Tom said, and I shook my head.
'No, I'm the lucky one, don't forget.'
'Actually, I think I am.'
It was a moment, just a moment. Our eyes met and I wanted to go home, climb into my big bed, feel his hands on me, his chest holding me still, a dream sequence interrupted by the stallholder.
'Right then,' he said, and the flashback had gone.
'How much is it?' I asked.
'Two pounds, each,' he replied.
'That's robbery.'
'Bank crisis, not me, darling.'
We got serious. We studied the angles, measured the distance, weighed the bean bags.
'The panda's such a great symbol,' Tom said. 'Look. It's half black, half white and comes from Asia.'
'Did you make that up?'
'No.'
'I won't use it then.'
He laughed. I liked his laugh, it was real, natural; it bubbled up like champagne over the top of the bottle.
'How's your finger?' he then asked.
'Up for it,' I replied.
'Are you doing the exercises?'
'Zealously,' I assured him.
He counted down like it was a moon mission, three, two, one…and we launched our greasy cloth bags of beans at separate sets of cans; to use them all on one stack was against the rules. The people before us had, with each attempt, tried to take out the middle can at the base of the six-can pyramid. The strategy scattered the outer cans, leaving two hard shots with only two bags. I went for the wing cans with the objective of clipping the central can by default, not that it worked, the presence of the remaining can always left behind on the shelf siphoning the money from my purse as we had another go, and another, performing the very act I had mentally mocked when I'd observed the two couples before us trying and failing.
'I thought I had a lucky face,' I said to the showman and he threw up his hands.
'You almost had that last one, you should have another go.'
'I don't think my bank manager would approve.'
'Now, they're the real robbers,' he said, and glanced away as he spotted another girl blessed with a lucky face.
We ambled through the crowd. Children fished for ducks and threw hoops over jars to win small stuffed toys. We watched a man bring a mallet down on a wooden block, a metal clanger rose up a numbered scale like a barometer and everyone cheered when a bell rang and he won a stuffed monkey. His girlfriend clapped and looked proud, her silver heels sunk in the mud, her lips drawn back in a delicious smile. The barrel organ ground out a merry melancholic tune, and an older couple wearing grave expressions were waltzing. A white balloon with a candle inside rose into the sky and the girls on the big dipper trembled with secret pleasure.
In the tube, on buses, in the street, if you catch people when they lift their gaze from their smart phones, they mostly look lost, bewildered, unsure about their lives, their relationships, the meaning, not of existence, just their own existence. People live with the vague fear of things over which they have no control, the weather, neighbours, bosses, unemployment, low pay, long hours, gangs, university fees, mortgages, interest rates, wars in far away places. Inside the light dome over the park those things were forgotten. They were happy, we were happy, and happiness is fleeting, it has to be held on to when it comes.
I grabbed Tom's arm.
'I'm starving,' he said.
'You're always starving.'
'It's true.'
We grinned. We were filling in the blanks like a painting by numbers. We held on to each other's eyes another moment and I pulled closer as we stood in line behind an Indian family, dad in a coat and tie, mum in a sari, their children, two girls and a boy in new clothes from Gap and French Connection, a generational disconnect. The eldest of the girls was about fifteen, skinny and chic. Her gaze went over my jacket with the leopard collar and she smiled as our eyes met.
'From Zara,' I said.
'I must get one,' she whispered.
'Yes, you must.'
The line shuffled along like refugees at a soup kitchen, I thought, and of course it wasn't like that at all, the simile springing to mind utter rubbish. I tried to imagine what I would have been doing that night without him in my life. It would never have entered my mind to visit the funfair. I would have been on the other side of the river in one of the clubs on the Kings Road, or in Wardour Street sipping champagne with a stranger prior to the danger rush speeding through the night in the back of a black cab.
With intermittent affairs with actors and photographers, my life was a cycle of research for Greta and Sophie and Milly, the girls who drew breath in my stories, little bits of me cloaked in the mask of words. At that very moment, I was gathering and distilling impressions from the movements of the crowd, the faces animated by the shadows and lights. The girl who had admired my jacket was now a character. She turned her head and smiled as she wandered off with her family, and it struck me that I was a part of London's multihued, polylingual population, not a speci
es apart observing the city with the gloom and distance of the reactionary press, the bigots.
We ate hot dogs dripping ketchup and mustard. He finished mine. I licked the red and yellow smear of war-paint from his cheek and he leapt up on the high step around the dodgems. He pulled me up.
'Come on, I bet you're good at this?'
'I've never tried.'
'If you've never tried you've never lived.'
He was smiling, boyish, the orphans of Sri Lanka forgotten for a moment. We ran across the steel floor and I stepped into a cream dodgem with crimson flames flared along the sides. I heard on the soundtrack My love is bigger than a Cadillac, something, something, something, and adored the metaphor, the energy. I jammed my foot down on the pedal and fled. He chased me around the circuit and rammed my car into the barrier. Orange sparks danced over the roof where the long arms at the rear of the dodgems grazed a meshwork of humming current.
A boy dressed from a fifties' film, tight jeans, white tee-shirt, red leather jacket, stepped on the rubber fender at the back of my car, leaned over to guide me in a tactical course and forced Tom's blue and silver charger into a head on collision with a man in a turban who waved his fist as he turned intent on revenge. They swerved and manoeuvred, butted each other like two stags fighting over a doe, and I slid out of reach with my private James Dean guiding the wheel. I could smell sweat and oil, the burnt sugar char of spent electricity. The night was cold but I didn't feel cold. My brow was damp. My fingers prickled with pins and needles and the world beyond the dodgems could have been a hologram.
The funfair appeals to the primitive genes buried in our DNA. It's where girls taste their first kiss and boys scar each other in knife fights. On the wet earth shoes grow muddy and faces gleam. The big wheel releases long shadows as it churns like a giant clock against the velvet night where unknown birds trace patterns on the invisible sky. Beneath the strobe lights and spotlights the people take on the appearance of dream creatures with luminous eyes and immobile faces, flamenco dancers and matadors, and I was transported back suddenly to an Andaluz night, hot as day, on an empty beach with a boy just met. We listened to the waves stealing into the bay and swam naked in the murmuring sea. We listened to the drums in some club along the coast. We listened to the falling stars hissing across the sky. We made love on the sand and never saw each other again. His name was Paco. He had black hair, shiny as a Cadillac, and he was beautiful.
Tom slipped his arm around my waist as we queued for seats on the big dipper. The ghosts of our breath disappeared, fleeing into the night. I gazed up at the vast network of girders and joists, a towering flimsy structure like something built by an ancient civilization, its meaning and purpose lost to time. My heart beat faster as we settled into a metal carriage behind an iron safety bar, our bodies pressed together, the music muted, the lights dimmed as if glowing through mist. The wheels juddered beneath us and my back grew clammy as the train of cars climbed the incline. The night as we rose turned black and I could taste ice in my mouth. The helter-skelter and dodgems below became buildings laid out in a toy town, the people small as ants moving aimlessly in every direction.
We reached the peak, the train shuddered, paused, as divers pause at the end of the diving board, and I screamed as we plunged grinding and screeching over the silver rails. Up we went again, rising into the void, and it felt as if the past had been wiped clean as we dived into the abyss. I buried my head in Tom's arms and he slipped his hand inside my jacket to still the red bird fluttering in my breast.
On the carousel I rode the white horse from my dream. Tom galloped along at my side on a black stallion with a golden mane, up and down, and it's like making love, the same rhythm, the same motion, the continuous rotations making me feel giddy. The wooden saddle slid over my sex and I grew oddly content sitting on the carousel beside this man who had come into my life like a stiff wind on a still day. I hadn't seen him since morning. We hadn't made love since before breakfast and I wanted to go home and make love again.
When you remove love from sex you enter a mansion with many rooms shaded in nuance and excess, an invitation to peel away all conventions and programming. A chance to explore your hidden self. A chance to be wicked. You shed something and clothe yourself in something else. Sex is the greatest of gifts, orgasm a glimpse of perfection. When you add love to sex it feels as if your soul is being drawn from the chains of gravity into the core of the infinite. New feelings come to life, emotions without explanations that we try to name with that perplexing little word we avoid using as if the word is sacred or sacrilegious.
Love is indefinable, a mystery, a distant light in the shadow of death: Romeo and Juliet. Tristan and Isolde. Mickey and Mallory from Natural Born Killers. Love is the twin of death, the conqueror of death. Love bends and curves like space and time. When you are in love you are less afraid of death because you would give your life for the object of your love. If love is blind and unconditional it must be because we have no control over it. Like nature. Like the tectonic plates below the earth's surface. Mothers feel that way about their children. But love and being in love are not the same. A woman takes the man she loves into her body and absorbs his oils and essence. A part of him enters her and becomes a part of her.
Love changes the chemical balance in the brain like a drug. It is a drug. Food tastes better. The rain on your face feels warm. When you dance it feels as if the notes of music emerge like an invisible chain that links directly to your moving feet. You smile for no reason. You like people you would not normally like. You forgive them. Love is like being on a small boat in the middle of the sea with no compass and no one to rely on except each other. Falling in love is completion. Falling out of love is a mini-death. I had, as Lizzie said, avoided writing about love and had never sensed that rush and buzz that comes with love, the release into the brain of body chemicals, pheromones and dopamine – the taste of love to which I was becoming addicted, his spearminty tongue when we kissed, his male sweat, the outdoor vanilla tang of his semen.
We bought candy floss, whirls of pink sugar on a stick, impossible to eat. Flags and bunting snapped at the air as we made our way towards the gate that would take us back to the Albert Bridge. We paused midway between the Ghost Train and the Tunnel of Love.
'One last ride?' he said.
'Which one?'
'You chose.'
I shook my head. 'I hate making decisions.'
'Is that true?'
'No, not at all,' I said, and he put his arms around me; he stroked my hair and I felt like one of his orphans gathered up.
'You love being contrary.'
'No I don't,' I replied and we both burst out laughing.
'Well, what's it to be?'
He released me and I looked around.
'Neither, I said. 'Come on.'
I led him towards the House of Mirrors. I paid and we snaked through the eerie light, two beautiful creatures from the masquerade, two grotesques from a drawing by William Blake, tyger, tyger burning bright. I was tall and short, fat and thin, joyful and sad. All the things that we are, and all the things we imagine we are, appear in the mirrors. I could see again that Andaluz night. I could see myself across the candlelit table with my tutor. I could see myself with Mr Devlin losing my virginity over and over again. The past emerges like the dead rising from their graves. The reflections reflect each other capturing movements and moments, and again I was reminded of Nude Descending a Staircase, the genius of it. The placement of each mirror in the maze was juxtaposed against the next, yet isolated, and I got the feeling that I was removed from time, that time wasn't continuous, but omnipresent, not a progression, but a ball of mirrors, that everything that ever was and everything that ever will be were connected by a cycle, by cause and effect.
Just as you have to squeal on the big dipper, you have to laugh in the House of Mirrors. We stood close together, our features elastic in the bowed and bent glass. I saw us as an old couple, withered and sparkly still. We
moved on, turned a corner. We had long faces like the figure in Munch's The Scream and compressed faces like a half-eaten hamburger. Marie-France appeared and disappeared. I saw myself in Lizzie. And Bella. And Mother. And the Chinese girl in the photograph with Daddy in Singapore. The mask under the mask slips away and in the House of Mirrors the stranger you see is yourself.
15
Death and the Maiden
My tutor's rooms were at the end of a narrow passage lit solely by a leaded window with scratched dimpled glass. The passage led to the back of the building and ended at a wooden door slightly askew in it frame. I gave the door two taps. There was no reply. I knocked again, a little harder, and his voice rang out like Don Giovanni in Mozart's opera.
'Yes, yes. I'm not deaf?'
I turned the handle and entered Professor Masters' den for the first time. It was hot with a gas fire blazing and the winter light filigreed with the curls of blue smoke that rose from the incense burning in a teak holder. He was sitting in the centre of a black leather sofa stabbing the pages of the paper he was reading, a red marker pen gripped in his fingers like a scalpel.
'Just wait a moment,' he said, and waved me towards the alcove on the far side of his study.
Dons' rooms tend to be shabby with ancient dust ground into ancient desks, books ranged like mountains of impregnable knowledge on every surface and two centuries of pipe smoke staining the ceiling. By contrast, Oliver Masters had created from his cloistered space the incongruous feel of a Berber tent with oriental rugs, saffron walls hung with black and white images in miniature frames and no chairs, just beaded cushions marooned around the sofa. The incense smell of dead flowers made me feel giddy and, the longer I stood listening to the scratching sound of the red pen pressing against the paper, the more ill at ease I became.
There was a draught around the window. The garden outside was planted with palms and banana plants wrapped in polythene to protect them from the frost. They appeared in the thin light like a row of beggars below the leaden sky. Like the tropical flora, I was bundled up with just as much care in a grey cashmere v-neck over a blue silk blouse, a grey wool skirt too short for the season, blue tights, black leather boots and a ski-jacket to keep me warm. The weather was bitter, but it was hot in the room and my back grew damp.
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