by Nick Laird
The car’s tail-lights receded, exited right. She glanced back and the man stopped, and she thought of playing Grandmother’s Footsteps with Bridget in the yard on Sherman Street. The grass had almost been hidden by pink cherry blossom. An image of Bridget’s tiny hands, a doll’s hands, pouncing on her, Bridget screaming and giggling. She started walking quickly again and a white cat slinked out from behind some bins. That did it: she broke into a run, her canvas bag slapping awkwardly against her side. Flight heightened her panic. In the noise her motion made, she was convinced she could hear him behind her, running, and if she turned now he would be there, six foot of shadow coming towards her, coming right for her, and would say nothing, do something…
Number 87. She vaulted up the steps and jammed the button for C, the top-floor apartment. David’s. The man was strolling now, thirty, forty metres away. It was fine. Was it fine? As he approached, she managed to pout disdainfully and stare past him, but kept her finger pressed on the buzzer. He was almost at the bottom of the steps, and then he was there, and he stopped. It was real. He was here to harm her. She stared and he stared back, his face a private smirk, the whole world some obscene joke. He was forcing himself into her consciousness, into her life, and she could do nothing about it. She made a shooing gesture at him, and then suddenly she was out of bravery: her knees went. She grabbed at the doorway for support. The man pulled his hands out of his black anorak and held them out, palms up, as if to say Cool it, let’s take it easy. But before he could speak, she cut in, her voice unnaturally high.
‘No—fuck you. I think you should walk on by, sir, and leave me alone.’ The ‘sir’ took even her by surprise. He took a step back and shrugged, still bemused.
‘Well look, I’m sorry but—’
‘If you try anything, I will kick you. I will kick the shit out of you. I’m not interested…’ She trailed off. Her American accent, minimal normally, sounded loud and false and ridiculous to her own ear, but she held his eye and nodded, to assure him she was serious. He sank his hands back into his anorak and leant against a lamppost as if he could quite happily wait there for eternity.
Upstairs David picked up the intercom handset: ‘Hello?’
‘Open the door. A man followed me and he’s right here.’
‘What? The buzzer’s broken. I’m coming down.’
Three floors up, in a steamy kitchen, David grabbed the first heavy thing to hand and descended the stairs three at a time. When he yanked open the front door, Ruth pawed at his arm, pulled him out onto the porch.
‘This man has been—’
David patted the fist that gripped his shirtsleeve. ‘Ruth, meet James,’ he said, there and then corrupting the future. She made a series of fathoming blinks and offered a panicky smile. David repeated: ‘This is James, my lodger.’
Ruth stood stiff with embarrassment, both hands clutching her shoulder bag.
‘Flatmate,’ Glover corrected, signing Don’t shoot, as he came up the steps. Ruth shook his outstretched hand, and noticed his engaging smile, his steady blue eyes.
‘I’m so sorry about freaking you out. I’d no idea…’
David backed against the hallway wall to let her pass, knocking unclaimed post from the radiator. Behind her, Glover widened his eyes at him as if to ask Who the hell’s this nutter? Ruth tugged the weapon David had picked up, a blue oven dish, from his hands.
‘And what’s with this? Were you gonna make him a casserole?’
The intricate machinery
They climbed the stairs to dinner in procession—Ruth, then David, then Glover. It had been some time since the communal hall had seen any love. Handlebars, furniture, umbrellas and shopping bags had scored and scuffed the once-white walls until now they resembled the notepads in stationers used to test pens. The bare bulb hung limply. The radiator had leaked last winter and rust in the pipes had left a dark blotch, Africa-shaped, on the carpet. The man who came to read the meter had asked David if it was a bloodstain.
‘I’m sorry—James—I’m sorry for getting so hysterical down there.’
‘No, not at all. As much my fault as yours.’
‘You really should have said something and reassured her.’
‘I tried but she told me to shut up. In fact she threatened me.’
‘I did, it’s true.’ Ruth laughed. ‘You know what it is? I think it’s that everything’s so terrible everywhere, I’m just waiting for something to happen to me.’
She looked around the kitchen, taking in the slatted calendar for the Fu Hu Chinese takeaway, the cupboard with the missing door, the tannic stains of damp on a corner of the ceiling. David would have felt embarrassed, but he had a hunch that Ruth liked to slum it occasionally. She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.
She leant against the steel sink, peering out of the window, and David stood beside her and followed her gaze down to the lit squares of distant kitchens, the empty trays of pale grey garden.
‘If I lived here I’d spend all my time looking at this view.’
He helped her off with her yellow wool coat, and she was tiny inside it and dressed, as expected, in black. He felt he’d removed the protective cover of something and was inspecting the intricate machinery. There was something raw and breakable about her. Things had not, David knew, been going at all well. In New York someone called Paolo had broken her heart.
‘It’s great you could come round.’
‘Oh, I have vast amounts of free time. New city, no social life. And didn’t we have fun in Larry’s club?’
‘Do you remember that basement bar afterwards? With all the bikers?’
‘They sang “Happy Birthday” to the barmaid.’
Glover left to change out of his work clothes, and David felt a pang in case his flatmate missed something, some further evidence of how close they were. Yet when he looked back to Ruth he could think of nothing to say. He eased out the cork with a pristine cluck. It would take some time to remember how they fitted together. She was reading a poem on the door of the fridge, standing with her hands on her hips as if she might start stretching. Her hairstyle was shorter, blonder, straighter-edged, the clothes more fitted; it was as if the focus had been sharpened.
‘So what have they actually got you doing, then, as artist-in-residence?’
David had served up the pasta bake, cut the baguette, forked out the spinach and rocket salad, and now stood holding the back of a kitchen chair, rocking gently on the balls of his feet. He felt curiously passive and wanted to exert some dominion over the room.
‘Walter’s organized this great flat in the Barbican, and a studio ten minutes away. As a space it’s wonderful, this washed-out English light coming through the skylights—it’s an old factory of some type, though I’m not sure what it made.’ She frowned at the mystery of industry.
‘But what are you going to make?’ Glover said, pouring more wine. The confidence with which he addressed her struck David as slightly presumptuous. He wasn’t even supposed to be in tonight. He was meant to be at work.
‘Which reminds me,’ David said, ‘we should talk about our project at some point.’
‘I can’t think about that at the moment.’ She gave a little shiver of her shoulders, and David tried hard to keep smiling. ‘I’ve got a million things to do right now. Did I tell you they’re doing a retrospective here in London, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts? And yesterday I spent three hours talking to students, though that was actually kind of fun. I forgot about that.’ She threw David a wide-eyed glance, and he looked away. Each time his eyes met hers he felt a charge of something, a little rolling emotion that would gather, if he let it, to an avalanche.
‘I was very young, of course, when I taught David—not much older than him, really.’
You were twelve years older, a small, uncharitable part of him wanted to say, exactly the same as you are now.
‘David’s teacher. So it’s you we should blame.’ In his la
ughter, Glover’s eyes became two slits in his face, two scars.
‘Not all the blame, I hope.’
David felt an uncomfortable passivity again. The oven had made the kitchen hot and he hoisted up the steamy sash window behind the sink; immediately September began to cool the room.
‘You only taught me for a few months, and to be honest,’ he laughed—at what he wasn’t sure, ‘I think the damage was already done.’
They were christened that evening. After dinner they adjourned to the living room and Ruth’s phone rang. At the sound Ruth looked sulkily around her, then lifted her canvas bag from the foot of the sofa and began to go through it, extracting an overstuffed black leather wallet, two purple silk-bound notepads, a hardback of Chekhov minus its dust jacket, a small Maglite torch, a silver glasses case, and then a phone the size and shape of a silver glasses case.
‘Her mobile’s not very mobile.’
‘It must be twenty years old.’
Ruth ignored them, wincing at the screen before answering it.
‘Hi, Karen, hi…No, that was from earlier. I straightened it out. I just didn’t know which form they meant…Right…No, I’m with a friend…No, I’m at the boys’ flat…Yes, tomorrow’s fine…Okay, great.’ She plunged the phone back in her bag. David realized she’d hung up without saying goodbye.
‘The boys?’ he asked.
After broaching a bottle of Amaretto that Glover located under the sink, Ruth announced that she was going to the National Gallery the next afternoon.
‘Is there something in particular you have to do?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, not really. I want to drop in and take a look at a few pictures, and then go somewhere else and think about them.’
Glover slapped his hand loudly against his chest in the gesture of allegiance. ‘Well, I’ve got to work, but David’s free, aren’t you?’ There was a hint of laughter behind his voice; he didn’t even understand that David would want to go.
‘I could check online and see what exhibition’s showing.’ ‘Or we could let it surprise us,’ Ruth said. David thrilled a little at that us.
‘You should drop into the Bell afterwards, sit and have a proper think about those pictures.’
David thought Ruth might take offence, but Glover had judged it finely. Through it all he possessed a firm sense of what people wanted from him.
The evening was out of the ordinary. David felt good. Here was difference and it was fine. Ruth on his sofa. An artist. An American. A woman. When Glover rang her a cab before heading, finally, to bed, there were just the two of them at last. David half-hoped and half-feared that a further intimacy would develop—as if now they’d lean in close and start declaring the stark facts of their lives—but it turned out Glover’s absence bred a vague uneasiness. When he disappeared, the strain of carrying on a one-to-one took hold, and Ruth checked her watch, then leant her chin on her hand, spacing four fingers along her jaw. David imagined them on his fleshy back, indenting. They were waiting for the buzzer and when it eventually went, they both started slightly, relieved. A chaste kiss on her hot cheek and she vanished. In bed he noticed, for the very first time, how the galaxies of Artex on his ceiling all swirled clockwise.
With a capital A
Raining when he woke, and so dark he thought it must still be night. Footsteps scuffled on the stairs and the front door banged: Glover was leaving for work. It was already after ten. A sheet of A4 on the kitchen table:
D, Thanks for dinner. Did you like the way I set you up? I’m on till six if you want to pop in later. God Save The Queen, J
The sign-off was a rejoinder to Who Dares Wins, which David had used on a note about milk and toilet roll a few days ago. It had been proverbs until recently. Had he set him up? Did he mean he’d set up a date with Ruth for him? Or did he mean he’d tricked him into going? David didn’t know. He crumpled up the note and dropped it in the pedal bin.
They’d agreed to meet outside the National Gallery at two, and he arrived ten minutes early. The rain had eased but not stopped, and the vista from the portico was still uniquely uninspiring: London done by Whistler, arranged in black and grey. Ragged, pewter clouds turned on Nelson’s head, so that he alone was all that held the heavens up. Lutyens’s limestone fountains were blown to spray and rain danced on the surface of their pools in time to the Cocteau Twins’ ‘Iceblink Luck’. Everything today had kept rhythm with the tunes on his iPod: the shunting of his tube carriage through its rock-wall galleries had accompanied The Clash, his footsteps on the underpass at Charing Cross had syncopated perfectly with the Blind Boys of Alabama. And now not even the Great British weather could puncture his mood. He was thinking about Ruth.
He had not been a success at Goldsmiths. Too shy and self-conscious in groups, he had fastened to students who showed him kindness and then been peeled, not kindly, off. Slowly he found a few friends with corners, who like him were awkward, and whose expectations had been comparably reduced. There was Adam, a tiny, witch-faced historian with a tinny, nasal voice; Michelle, a chubby goth who smoked all the time and looked skywards when someone addressed her; and a gentle nervous Chinese boy called Wu, who was almost certainly gay and had, David learnt from the alumnus magazine, hanged himself three years ago. He tried not to think of that time in his life. It was all too ambiguous, shameful and strange. He’d been vengeful then and quick to take umbrage, had found refuge in books and movies, and as a general policy scorned the world. It was only since he’d begun teaching himself and had made his own students laugh that he’d realized misanthropy could be taken for wit, and had found some semblance of pleasure in anger and cynicism.
But he still remembered anyone who’d once been nice to him, and that morning had pulled two cardboard boxes out from under his bed. It was a blue file, its spine entitled From Easter Island to Henry Moore—Versions of the Human. On the inside flap he’d written: Ruth Marks, Visiting Artist—Introductory Module on Sculpture. As he flipped through it, what came to mind was the moment he’d first seen her. He had slid, a few minutes late, into the back row. In various dark layers, with a black headscarf over her blonde hair, the new lecturer was gripping each side of the podium as if she might fall. She had huge dark eyes, deepened with a ring of kohl, and spoke with excessive solemnity, trying to convince them that she was a serious proposition. The sobriety, though, couldn’t stay completely intact. Her voice would crack with emphasis, she’d accidentally enthuse. She had an ardour that came with practising the art, a passion the professional tutors had lost.
David’s own journey to art, or Art as he always thought of it, had been a wrong turning. He was never quite sure why he’d been accepted onto the foundation course in the first place. Even now he was embarrassed by the sight of a watercolour from his A-level year that still hung in his parents’ downstairs toilet: an acid-green sky against which a singular figure in black trekked over the crest of a mountain. All his work had featured a lone individual in a vast backdrop, and only recently had he realized the link with the image of the sage on the mountainside, of Jesus or Muhammad in the desert, of Buddha by himself beneath the Bodhi Tree. He too, David Pinner, had been looking for enlightenment. And it had come, after a fashion: at Goldsmiths he met real artists, those whose panicked relationship with their materials betrayed not a fear of mediocrity, of exposure, as his did, but a recurring, unanswerable compulsion.
He pretended for a while; then stopped pretending. After one of Ruth’s lectures, he decided to stay behind and tell her he was changing courses. The hall’s draughty windows were mirrorbacked by the darkness of the winter afternoon, and stirred with his reflection as he walked towards the front. His steps echoed. Her hair in two Teutonic plaits, Ruth rustled across the stage in a madeira hippy skirt with tassels and small round mirrors sewn into it. She was folding her notes, too tightly to use again, scrunching them into a paper bolt.
‘Ms Marks?’
She looked up, mustered a smile. ‘Ruth. Please.’
‘
Ruth. Hi. I wanted to say firstly that I’m finding your course really fascinating—’
She gave a rueful little laugh; the tassels swished as she moved towards her bag. ‘Well, isn’t that kind. I wish they all felt like you do.’
Some of the students had left, noisily, during the lecture. Ruth sometimes got lost in her text and repeated herself. Other times she simply stopped and stared over their heads.
‘Oh, they just want to get home. It happens on Friday afternoons.’
‘Really?’
David nodded bravely, saddened by his fellow undergraduates’ priorities.
‘Still, today’s did not go well…’ A bell rang in the corridor outside and stopped. ‘If it’s the handout, I don’t have any more copies now but next week—’
‘Oh no, I got one of those. It was more of a general thing.’ Up close the long nose became a little sharp, though it contained all the intelligence and glamour of European Jewry and sat, to David’s untutored Old World eyes, a touch uncomfortably with the Aryan hair. ‘I just wanted to thank you for your lectures. They’ve made me think in ways about things…’
She smiled uncomfortably. He realized he was giving the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ speech and stopped. She waited for a few seconds, then swung her velvet bag up onto her shoulder and helped him out. ‘But you wanted to tell me you’re leaving the course?’
He was dropping art altogether and changing to English literature. They ended up sitting on the stage steps and talking for almost fifteen minutes. She asked David about himself and his family, and he found himself telling her. About being the only child of a philistine butcher and a woman fuelled by tension. He had never had any support. He needed the support. Why could they not have given him their support? When he’d begun to cry—for all frustrated artists, for all hampered ambition, for all the sensitive souls in the world—she’d dredged up a tissue stained with make-up from her bag, and had praised the bravery of his difficult decision. He often thought about how kind she’d been to him, and how attractive he’d found her own weird mix of confidence and fear. He’d kept that tissue in his pocket all evening, and the next day had been reluctant to bin it, although he had. Years later, in a second-hand book shop in the Elephant and Castle, when he came upon a glancing reference to her in A Guide to Contemporary American Art, he ran his fingertip along her name and bought the book.
