Between Each Breath

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘You know, she great with sport,’ said Andres, sucking on his cigarette. He’d offered me one but I’d refused, pointing to my jaw. ‘Gymnastic. Champion gymnastic.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yah. Why she so tough, you know? Bam!’

  Andres laughed, his scalp corrugating under his shaven head.

  ‘If only I’d known,’ I said. ‘Wow. A champion gymnast.’

  The door opened behind us but it was only a customer – a lean-looking, wind-burned guy in his twenties with thin wrists and neck and a sophisticated yellow cagoule with zip pockets all over it. He came up to the barman and said, ‘Excuse me, mate, I need to pay. There’s no one serving. I had a Coke and a beef-and-onion bap thing.’ He was Australian, or maybe New Zealand. A cyclist, I guessed. Crossing Europe from Spain to Siberia and back.

  The barman said, ‘For free,’ glancing at me, and took a deep drag on his cigarette. ‘OK? I don’ care.’

  ‘OK, mate, that’s fine by me,’ said the Australian, disappointingly. He turned to me and said, ‘Well, I’d better not go looking for tricks in Estonia, then.’

  ‘Mind your own frigging business,’ I muttered, looking away.

  ‘Don’t care a bloody toss,’ said the cyclist. ‘Actually.’

  He went off on springy legs, leaving me feeling very unpleasant. My eye was watering. I wondered if you could have your eyeball dislodged slightly. My arm was being squeezed. The drill started whining from the building opposite.

  ‘Hey,’ said Andres, ‘I tells her now, you know? What you say at me. Next time, knife in the heart. Yow. Nobody coming, after that. In your book, finished.’

  ‘Unless they like blood sports.’ In fact, my nose had run out of blood.

  Andres squeezed my arm again and told me to take a seat, indicating the terrace. ‘Please.’

  He disappeared back into the café while I settled myself at the same table as the theorbo player had sat at a few days before. It wasn’t too chilly out here, now. I felt my cheek, which was stiff but less painful. It was no more than the impact of a football, I told myself. But I was in really deep yogurt. I wanted to run off, run away up the pretty little cobbled street. She’d been a champion gymnast, so she was competitive and aggressive. Hit first, ask questions later. Now I was going to have to apologise, I knew it, and this irritated me. I didn’t want to face her. And the barman had believed me about the travel-guide thing. Humour didn’t travel, not when it was all in the tone. The drill had stopped.

  When she came out with Andres, I saw she was carrying a book. It was the tatty copy of Anna Karenina. She had an open denim jacket over the T-shirt. Andres was guiding her by the elbow.

  I stood up. ‘He’s explained?’

  She nodded. She looked either deeply ashamed or deeply resentful, I couldn’t quite make out which.

  ‘Look, I don’t blame you, I’m really, really sorry,’ I began, charitably. ‘A complete misunderstanding, stupid mistake on my part, language problem. Oh, thank you.’

  I took the book from her. No thirty-page segment dropped out, or even protruded slightly. No notes, either. This would go down in our history, I thought; the two of us.

  ‘Wow, it’s mended,’ I went on, my face in sudden agony. ‘Don’t worry about my cheek. It’s fine. I’ve got hit by loads of iron weights in my life. No problem.’

  Andres turned to Kaja and said, ‘OK? A few minute. Be friend.’ Then he whispered something fierce – something no doubt about my travel guide – and went back inside like a headmaster leaving his charges. The said charges sat down opposite each other in silence and studied the table’s rusted ironwork.

  ‘I guess I’m not very good at Estonian,’ I said, the pain settling to a nauseous ache. A whole toffee apple was stuck inside my cheek, and I had a cucumber for a right-hand jaw.

  She was looking at me straight in the eyes, now, her mouth tucked in at the corner – but not in that smiling way. She hadn’t yet said anything, I realised. She was judging me, maybe, judging whether I was just another visiting liar. Her eyes were the colour of the bay at twilight.

  Then, miraculously, the pucker at the corner of her mouth spread its smile over the rest of her face, settling brilliantly in her eyes. My own glanced away under the strain of the intimacy, and then returned. Hers hadn’t flinched, meanwhile. It was as if she was considering something right at the back of my mind.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I better get starting to teach you, I guess.’

  One evolves. One resolves problems by taking this route or that route, each minuscule decision building like cells into a different creature.

  My decision was to let this thing roll.

  I knew very early on where it was going to end. But I let it roll. I was scared, in a way, my chest full of silky little wings trapped in a cage, so I took the position of least resistance.

  Kaja was like no one I had ever met before. Admittedly, I’d had a sheltered life, from Hayes on – spent entirely in the portable geodesic dome of music. But still.

  She had been brought up in almost total isolation from the rest of the world on a strategic island where the main business was tending rockets that could end the world. Otherwise it was farming, she explained, mostly of the collective type or on home allotments. Her father was a builder, then a supervisor in an office with responsibility for building materials. Until independence, he was one of the state’s tiny, bureaucratic cogs. Now he was nothing; free, but with nothing.

  ‘Do you know what it’s like to have nothing?’

  ‘Um, no, not really.’

  ‘Are you married?’ she asked. ‘Kids?’

  I still wonder at how coolly I lied, then, shaking my head, this bulky lock of hair that passed for a fringe slipping over my eyebrows. I pushed it back. I might have been answering the kids part of the question, not the marriage part. I was glad I had been unable to put my ring back on, although its trace still showed.

  ‘I better go do my job,’ she said. ‘Andres is pretty angry with me from beating you up.’

  ‘So was I.’

  She laughed, for the first time. The tarp on the other side of the street billowed out in a gust and cracked back: the restorer’s sign shivered – the gold-starred, blue EU badge in the corner making it look like a giant stamped letter. The building next door was caked with a furry pelt of Soviet-provided dirt.

  She put her hand on Anna Karenina to stop the gust lifting the cover.

  ‘How are you liking Karenin, the poor husband?’

  I’d never got beyond thirty-odd pages on my previous attempts, so I shrugged. ‘Pretty annoying,’ I guessed.

  She frowned. ‘And Vronsky?’

  ‘You’ve read it, then?’ I ventured, battling to remember who precisely Vronsky was. A student? I knew I would come a cropper one day from not reading the world’s best novel. From not really reading many novels at all.

  But I do have perfect pitch.

  She nodded. ‘Three times, I’ve read it.’

  ‘Three!’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Just once, when I was eighteen.’ Nothing I was saying, I realised, was true. It was easy once you started. Travel-guide writer, Tolstoy reader, bachelor. ‘I need to read it again, which is why I brought it along.’

  ‘Vronsky is like a shark. Very white, very straight teeth. You like poetry, also?’

  ‘I do. I don’t read enough of it, though.’

  She reached into the top pocket of her jacket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

  ‘I forgot that,’ she said. ‘Looks important. Like plans of a big bomb.’

  It was the page of my extemporised notes about the melismata. I realised how redundant they were, now.

  I thanked her with gusto. ‘Now I can blow up the Houses of Parliament. Phew.’

  Andres popped his head round the door. ‘Friend? OK?’

  I said we were very good friends indeed and Andres gave a low, suggestive chuckle. Kaja said something in Estonian and Andres replied briefly, flapp
ing his hand towards her, and left.

  ‘He says take my time.’

  ‘Nice guy.’

  ‘Stoned from his head. All the time. Hashish.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘You here for business or pleasure?’

  My eyes flinched at the word ‘pleasure’. Wiping imaginary sweat off my brow, I said: ‘For inspiration. I’m a composer.’

  ‘Composer?’

  ‘Contemporary music. Not pop or rock. Yeah.’

  ‘Travel guide?’

  ‘No. Andres got the wrong end of the stick, I think. English irony.’

  ‘Or French,’ she said. ‘Voltaire. You like Voltaire?’

  ‘Yeah. Anyway, I’m only a writer of music. But don’t tell him.’

  She nodded slowly, her face an open book, showing how intrigued she was. I knew I had ratcheted up the game with this one confession, never mind her evident intelligence and culture. It couldn’t have been better if I’d said ‘poet’: this wasn’t England, this was Estonia. What was I up to? My wife was in the earliest stages of pregnancy.

  ‘Why our little country?’

  ‘It’s this British millennial project to compose a big collective piece for the New Europe,’ I explained, thinking how boring, even patronising, it sounded. ‘One British composer per country. I got Estonia.’

  ‘You like that?’

  ‘I think Estonia and Estonians are wonderful,’ I assured her. I was still to visit the proper countryside here, the ancient peat bogs and the wild forests. ‘Even when they beat you up.’

  ‘That’s making for a change,’ said Kaja. ‘Normally Estonians are being beaten up, for seven hundred years.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But no more.’

  ‘For the moment,’ she said. ‘Are you playing it here?’

  ‘The piece? No. It’s for something called the Dome.’

  She hadn’t heard of the Dome, to my surprise.

  ‘The Dome,’ I explained, trying not to sound like a national sales pitch, ‘is this very exciting project for the millennium. It’s this massive geodesic structure on a run-down bit of the Thames in London in which there are going to be all kinds of interactive things, like this giant body you can walk through, amazing trapeze artists, and so on. Our piece is going to be for a fairly major opening concert in the presence of bigwigs – the Queen, Tony Blair, you name it. Winds for the New Europe. I have to have one wind instrument at least, because of that title. I didn’t choose the title, it’s already got us into trouble, for obvious reasons.’

  She frowned, puzzled.

  ‘Anyway, it’ll be cool,’ I went on, hurriedly. ‘In fact, the whole Dome project’s in trouble, but it’ll be great in the end. Fantastic, in fact. A huge honour. This is a big opportunity for me to reach a much bigger audience. Usually, I get about ten people, five of them fellow composers and the other five music academics, plus a few nasty critics.’

  ‘That is over ten,’ she pointed out.

  I realised I’d said more in the last minute than in the last nine days put together. It was something about the way she listened, with a quiet intent and something amused dancing on her lips. But I also realised I’d said too much, too much about myself. She had not even asked my name, like others would have done – an excited question usually followed by a look of disappointment.

  ‘And you, Kaja?’

  The next morning, the phone rang suddenly (particularly suddenly) in the apartment. It was on the little table and made me jump. I reached for it without getting out of the sofa.

  ‘Hi there!’ I said, overenthusiastically. ‘Wow. Whassup?’

  ‘I’d have thought you’d have phoned.’

  ‘We agreed not to.’

  ‘That was before. Before the good news.’

  ‘I didn’t realise,’ I said, vaguely.

  Kaja was sitting next to me on the sofa, naked except for her slip, which had little targets dotted all over it. I rose gingerly and walked over with the cordless to the other end of the room. I was crouched, scratching my temple like a professor or someone in pain. I wanted my wife to go away, to vanish. I couldn’t believe I could be so evil.

  ‘Anyway, sweetheart,’ Milly was saying; ‘the good news is confirmed.’

  ‘Oh, amazing.’

  ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Right here,’ I said.

  ‘Congratulations?’

  ‘Completely. It’s fantastic.’

  ‘You’re being a bit cold.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You in the middle of work?’

  ‘Yup. But don’t worry. It’s going great.’

  I looked up. Kaja had her head on one side, leafing through the TV magazine provided by the flat, with a Baltic celebrity in a thong on the cover. She was trying not to listen, obviously. She had just showered. Her skin, in the low light, was precisely the same colour as the cut apple’s browning flesh on the table. I was in love with her. Her small breasts were shaped like bells. I had squeezed seed into her like pulp through a cheese cloth, the way Milly made jams. It had felt like squeezing rather than spurting, it had gone on so deliciously long. Three more times, each one a variation on the first. I was already almost game for a fifth.

  Milly’s voice broke in, very close. ‘I won’t disturb you again,’ she was saying. ‘I’m just sharing it. I thought you’d want to.’

  ‘It’s early days.’ I was making a huge effort, and this provided its own fuel. I think I sounded genuine, now. ‘That’s all I’m thinking.’

  ‘Just that?’

  ‘I’m holding myself back, I think. Not tempting fate.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Doing?’

  ‘When you’re not working? Seeing lots of snazzy girls? Lap dancing?’

  I began to laugh but my glottis acted of its own accord and cut it off with a gulp. I could see Milly’s dazzling smile as she’d made the joke. She loved me. I heard faint bumps and crackles as she walked about and did weekendy things in the house, the receiver tucked into her shoulder, her head at the same angle as Kaja’s.

  ‘OK, I’d better get back to the piece. I’m really into it. It’s sort of flowing. Your work OK?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I sympathised, rubbing the nylon lace curtains between my finger and thumb. There was the hull of a tiny fly caught in them.

  ‘I shouldn’t be disturbing you,’ said Milly, clearly having believed me. ‘I do care. Best of British. Big kiss on the lips and everywhere else. Especially down there. I’m thinking about you in bed.’

  ‘Yeah, same here. Byeee.’

  I actually crooked my fingers in a little wave. I put the phone down. I shrugged.

  Kaja said, the wet tips of her hair like thorns tattooed on her upper arms, ‘I hope that wasn’t your girlfriend in England.’

  ‘Jesus, no,’ I said, grinning like an idiot. ‘That was my mum.’

  TWO

  Nine years earlier, back in 1990, Milly (seated behind her splat of programmes outside the Purcell Room) hadn’t heard of Jack Middleton. This amused me at the time, especially as I was featuring in the concert. She was in the process of having her heart broken by her boyfriend, a quiet, severely intellectual Iranian refugee called Firuz, still slightly bowed from torture. Although Milly and I became friends she would not let it go any further, not until she had recovered.

  She was in her year off, bound for Oxford to read PPE. I felt there was no other girl in the world for me and became almost completely chaste. I left England to study computer-aided composition at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where I failed to complete my doctorate on the works of Cornelius Cardew. I developed a brief taste for hashish and cocaine in all-night dives where serious jazz was played, until I was found waiting one night by a canal in Amsterdam for the law of the Lord to rise from the waters out of the psychedelic lozenges of light and embrace me purely and cleanly, weeping. It was a close shave.

  Milly and I met again at a post-concert garden party seve
ral months after my return, three years later: I was, by now (according to one review), ‘England’s most promising young composer’.

  Milly had left Oxford, having narrowly missed a second, and was working for the Palestinian cause from a shared house in Kilburn. Despite this, she wore a long, glittery dress and pharaonic earrings and had around her throat a thick gold collar in the form of an asp. She was Cleopatric, as (somewhat blissed out on Pimm’s) I remarked. Milly seemed relieved to see me again, treating me with what felt like nostalgia, as if I’d been away in the wars. Her current man, a flamboyant Palestinian film-maker in his forties called Saleem, had just two-timed her, and she was adrift.

  I had meanwhile given up any hope of being her bloke, so it was with intense surprise that I found myself shivering on my bed that same night, in my squalid room in Arsenal, entirely naked at her express command. She only followed suit, drunkenly unclothing herself down to (but not including) her jewellery, after subjecting me to a humorous lecture on the need for male sexual abstinence. She was impressed by the fact that my jism’s reach (not inside her that first time, as there was no protection to hand) got as far as her chin, despite the Pimm’s. I was more impressed to find myself still intact, as her honey-yellow nakedness, her spry fingers, had made me feel as if I was stuffed with pleasure’s most expensive fireworks, going off at last like the Guy Fawkes all those years ago on Hayes Common.

  As an eleven- or twelve-year-old, reading a novel by Nicholas Monsarrat I’d got out of Hayes Town Library and which – behind its sticky plastic cover – took place in eighteenth-century India and featured a spirited, long-limbed princess of an unearthly loveliness, I had imagined my first kiss. It was nothing like my actual first kiss a little later, in which I managed to indent a girl’s cheek with my teeth in the darkness of a party game, or even my first proper French kiss in the shadows of an end-of-term grope, which was a mess of spittle, or even the first successful kiss tutored by a flat-chested thirty-two-year-old clarinettist called Marie-France on a young person’s orchestral tour in Belgium, who also deflowered me in the hotel (though without success on my part, due to nerves). Neither was it anything like the first time I kissed Milly, partly because I was conscious of representing (to Milly, at least) the white working-class-boy-made-good – an example of which she hadn’t yet scored with, apparently. I didn’t tell her that I neither thought of myself as being working class nor as living on a council estate, although both were technically true, until I was eighteen.