It was Myra.
Instead of calling over the hedge, I went upstairs to look out of the bedroom window. Two people were down there, but I couldn’t get enough of an angle between the hedge and the wall to see what they were doing. ‘Mind you,’ Myra said, ‘I did hear of a blind man who, whenever he was abroad, went into souvenir shops to touch the goods. He would run his fingers over a Tower Bridge or an Eiffel Tower, whatever, to get some idea of the shapes of the city he was in.’ There was a pause. ‘On the other hand,’ she said, ‘I don’t suppose there are enough blind people to keep Venice above water.’
Later, when I asked her, ‘How was work today?’ she answered, ‘Oh, the usual bloody grind.’ Then she added, in a voice not quite like her own, because sympathy was a difficult thing for Myra, a response drawn forth only with the aid of deep resources of patience and stamina:
‘And how do you feel?’
I wasn’t sure. In one way at least, I said, I actually felt relieved. Once my mother had suffered this disaster I could embrace it as a possible fate of my own. In a sense I could even look forward to it, because prior to that I had only my father’s death as a template. For years I’d expected to die suddenly and be removed without warning from other people’s lives, the way he had been when I was thirteen. ‘I’m not sure you’ll understand this,’ I told Myra, ‘but now I can imagine something different for myself.’ I had something new to look forward to.
‘Jesus,’ she said. She said that if I needed to see someone, she could get me a recommendation. She said, ‘Look, do you want the rest of that?’
We were at Le Vacherin in Acton Green. It was late. Our waitress had an inturned look. Outside, Acton Green Common lay in a moonlike trance all the way to the tube line. Apart from ours only a single table remained occupied, by a young couple who had brought their very small, quiet baby with them. It didn’t look more than a day or two old, and they were obviously delighted by it. Every ten minutes they lifted it out of its carrycot as if they had just been given it, passed it to and fro across the table, then settled it back again. Myra had lost patience with this pantomime early on, but seemed undecided how to respond. Now she put down her spoon in the remains of my prune and Armagnac tart and said in a loud voice:
‘Did they order that? Only I can’t find it on the menu.’
They stared at us in surprise. Didn’t we like their baby? No one disliked their baby.
Myra shivered.
‘They hate me,’ she said. ‘I’ll see a cat when we leave here. There’ll be a cat out there now.’
Myra hated cats. She claimed they were sly and untrustworthy; their love was cupboard love and without looking hard you could find something flat in their eyes. A dog’s eyes, on the other hand, had depth. A black cat crossing their path, some people think, brings luck. Myra wouldn’t walk down a street if any kind of cat had crossed it that morning. She said they smelled.
‘I don’t know how you can bear the touch of them,’ she said with a shudder.
At a loss, I could only tell her the following story—
‘Things were chaotic and miserable during Adam and Eve’s retreat from Paradise. The children squalled endlessly. There hadn’t been time to pack. Adam, who regretted the whole episode, blamed Eve; Eve realised for the first time that Adam was a wimp. Jacob, the third son, was particularly upset. With the whole tribe cowed and disoriented, less by God than the weather outside, only the family cat Mau had the presence of mind to memorise the route. A few years later, driven by her love for Jacob, who had allergies and never came to terms with the world, the cat led him back. Impressed by the boy’s obsessiveness, the angel on the gate that day offered Jacob a piece of the maternal fruit. But as a reward for Mau’s loyalty, he franked the route permanently into the blank back pages of her DNA. From that time on, there has always been a cat who remembers the way back to the Garden of Eden.’
‘I heard it was their dog,’ Myra said.
Talk to someone in a coma and you are talking to yourself. When it’s your mother there are further complications. What do you say to her? I really liked your meringues? That time when I was eleven and threw up on the tea table from eating Heinz spaghetti on toast – do you remember? – sorry about that! The things you expect to say, you don’t. The things you want to say don’t seem quite right. Eventually I began to talk about myself. I gave her progress reports dating back as much as twenty years, from the parts of my life she had missed. I listed my divorces. ‘It took a long time to learn to like myself,’ I concluded, ‘but I’m doing quite well now. I don’t think I’m as angry as I was, not as angry or as scared.’ It brought her up to date and it was therapeutic for us both. I used all my charm on her, son to mother, and she used all hers on me, mother to son, staring coyly up at the ceiling of Bramley Ward, bursting with the secret no one wants to hear.
My sister left a message for me with the nursing staff.
‘She does seem rather anxious to get in touch with you,’ they said, handing over the damp, heavily folded piece of coloured paper on which was written, ‘You’ll have to talk to me in the end.’
I stared at these words, then out of the window of the 1.50pm to Euston. Now, I don’t know. Or do I? What I would say now is that until the thing with Myra happened I didn’t feel enough terror. I would say that like everyone else I ate too much; looked forward too often to the evening bottle of Chilean red. That’s what I would say now. But that afternoon all I could do was smooth out the paper until you could barely tell it had been folded, and leave it behind me on the table when the train got in.
Back in Chiswick, someone was in Myra’s house. The truth of this visited me not experientially – as a smell or faint sound, a sense of occupation, of usedness, in the air – but as a kind of prior knowledge validated by my sister’s note, the moment I opened the door. I stood just inside the hall, the way we all have done at one time or another, and called:
‘Hello? Myra?’
They were in the bedroom. She was on her hands and knees and he had got up on her from behind in the gloom. They were panting harshly, and their faces had a stunned look as if something was happening they didn’t understand. He had a thick ginger beard. She seemed to have one, too, but I suppose that must have been an effect of the shadows in the room, the few thin slats of river light angling in through the blind. As I watched, he began to turn round so that he faced in the opposite direction to her. It was a slow, awkward procedure if he was to keep his cock inside her. But he did it eventually, and they remained like that, motionless and uncomfortable-looking, until I closed the door on them. They hadn’t seemed to notice me.
That had to be the end of it.
‘I hate dogs,’ was my parting shot to Myra. ‘I hate their shit. The smell of it makes you heave.’
When I’m in Chelsea I still look for her, listen for her voice, watch for the swing of the head slowed by its counterweight of vanished meanings. I see her there sometimes with other men. They’re over-attentive, but then this is the Arts Club. Myra’s sitting at the same table she sat at with me, staring at the Cupid fountain. ‘You’ve got to understand,’ she’s telling someone, ‘that other people are as confused as you. Just not so self-involved.’
My mother clung on for a while then died. The funeral went well, in that none of the relatives fought; although one or two refused to attend. Perhaps to help make up the numbers, my sister brought her dog, an English bull terrier with a big white blind-looking face. Two months later she was telephoning me every other day to ask for money; once a week she would write a letter summing up the injustices done her by the remains of the family.
She lived with the dog, on one of those estates financed by the optimism of the late 1940s, a hundred and ten company houses in light-coloured brick set down around bleak flat squares and triangles of grass. She made some sort of life for herself there. Eventually I drove up to visit her, and we leafed through the family albums. There was my father, Guy Fawkes night 1968, thirty three years old but
laughing as fatuously as a boy, in a boy’s red-and-white football scarf, with the bonfire lighting up one lens of his spectacles. I never liked him. He died not long after the photo was taken, and that only made things worse. It reduced the chances of settling anything between us.
After his death my mother couldn’t stand mess. She decorated often, bought new furniture and carpets; cleaned and cleaned. I can’t stand mess, she would tell us, meaning, I can’t stand the mess you’ve made of my life. I don’t think there was any doubt she loved him, and adored him, and depended on him. She grew roses in the garden he had measured out so exactly with pegs and twine. She grew them in the way he would have approved, pruned to stumps in severely rectangular beds, surrounded by grey, cloddy, heavily weeded earth. Even at that age I could feel her looking around in a numb way and wondering how she would make sense of it all, which I don’t think she ever did. It all fell apart when he went. Things were too much for her. That was the feeling I had from my mother around then, that her hold on things was marginal, that we were a difficulty hard to contend with: things were difficult enough without the demands we might make.
‘Our mother always preferred you,’ my sister said. ‘We need to talk that out. We need to talk about it.’
I asked if I could go to the toilet.
She looked puzzled. ‘Of course you can,’ she said. ‘Of course you can go to the toilet.’
It was another greenhouse Sunday, high humidity and temperatures in the 30s. Every so often she coaxed the bull terrier on to the steps outside the kitchen door and poured a two-litre bottle of Evian water over its head. For the next few minutes it sat in an evaporating puddle with its tongue lolling out of the side of its mouth and an expression of bliss on its face, while its pinkish eyes remained as hard as marbles. The back yard was full of dogshit, and stacked up on the hard earth was all my mother’s furniture – two double mattresses, a thirty-year-old Creda gas cooker, armchairs and sofas the vinyl of which had already faded and split in the sun and rain. My sister was in dispute with the council over this. She was in dispute with her neighbours over it. ‘But be honest with me,’ she said, ‘where else could I put it all? I ask them that and they can’t answer.’ She was in dispute with almost everyone about almost everything, and in addition genuinely disabled by asthma. The house smelled of the dog, which rarely took its eyes off me.
Driving back down the M1 an hour or two later, I spotted a couple and a child in a splash of sunlight, waiting by their car for the breakdown service. The woman and her little boy smiled at every passing vehicle; the man only seemed embarrassed. You often see families like this, poised on the hard shoulder of the motorway where woods and wildflowers spill down a shallow bank to the edge of the tarmac. Their afternoon is already ruined. The AA has been called, the outing postponed. It’s a cracked radiator, it’s electrical, it’s something none of us, any more, can fix. There’s nothing left to do but wait. At first they stand awkwardly in their careful high street clothes, unable to find a body language for the situation. Then, after five minutes, something happens. They move away from the vehicle, shade their eyes, peer at one another or back at the motorway, torsos moving one way, legs another, in the long grass. From the nearby woods a bird sings, there is a flicker of movement. The child tilts its head alertly to listen; the parents look at the child. Suddenly they hang between choices, up to their calves in moon daisies and cornflowers, surrounded by a froth of elder blossom and pink dog roses. Possibilities stretch away in the form of field and hedge. Scents, sounds. For a moment it’s likely they will abandon the car and disappear, having mistaken this strip of woods between the motorway and the low-lying pasture for something they can run off into for good.
JO MAZELIS
SKIN
IT WAS THE coldest day Clara had ever known. The wind coming from the north; a freezing airstream from the top of the world where there is still ice, and she feels it in her bones – an arctic crack.
She’s wearing tights under her jeans, thick woollen socks over the tights, heavy, thick-soled, low-heeled black leather boots. Then two T-shirts, a wool jumper, a jacket and, over it all, a black wool coat. Knitted hat, a scarf and fleece-lined leather gloves, yet she still feels the wind whistling through her, tracing its breath over her skin, sending up goosebumps. So cold. So, so cold.
Clara is meeting him at ten at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They have decided to meet inside. Not at the entrance. She is walking fast, though there is no need to. No need to hurry at all, except for the cold.
‘Meet me by the screaming man,’ he’d said earlier on the phone.
‘The painting? By Munch?’ she asked, though she was sure Munch’s Scream wasn’t in the US.
‘No. It’s a sculpture. White marble. On a tall column. Forget who did it. But there it is, this head in agony, life size or bigger, disembodied, on a white pillar. God, who’s the artist?’
‘Um, is it a twentieth-century artist?’
‘No, don’t be so stupid. What’s the damn name?’
He can’t remember, but she’s the one who is stupid.
She says nothing. Stops listening, though she can still hear his voice going on and on. In German there is no difference between the words ‘listen’ and ‘hear’, Clara remembers. She is glad that English allows her this distinction.
She likes pictures with words in them. Liked Ed Ruscha’s large-scale paintings of traditional nineteenth-century-style landscapes with added text in the sky: WAR FAMINE PILLAGE. Was it Ed Ruscha who used to live at the Chelsea Hotel and paid his rent with paintings? Or was that someone else? Larry Rivers? And does it matter?
She was on the phone to Kaspar. Hearing and not listening. Sitting on the edge of her bed holding the receiver to her ear and gazing out of the window at the building just across the way. Fire escape zigzagging up. A pair of trainers on one of the window ledges. They must smell bad, she thinks. On another ledge, a carton of milk.
The steam heat has been on all night so she is not yet dressed after the shower. As if she were at the beach, she’s wearing a bra and panties. She must look like someone in an Edward Hopper painting. Or a photo by Nan Goldin. Or a still from a movie – Gus Van Sant or Larry Clark.
Sex and art.
That’s what she and Kaspar do together.
Sex and art.
The art in order to make both of them feel that there is a real relationship going on. Even though there isn’t. The sex because . . . well . . . just because.
She gets up still holding the phone to her ear, parades around the room.
Clara is twenty-six years old. Body lean. Her bra is flesh-coloured; nipples can be glimpsed, flattened disks rosy behind the sheer nylon fabric. The bikini pants are sky blue with a pattern of pink flowers. She bought them at Macy’s. The blinds in the room are drawn up. She imagines someone watching her from the building across the way. Imagines them filming her. Months later, she’ll go to MOMA, to a video installation by a hot new artist and wow, what do you know, it’s her projected onto the white gallery wall, larger than life, twelve feet tall. Her, as she is now, in her underwear, gracefully insouciant in her anonymous room, filmed from outside, the window an effective framing device.
Her cat lay on the bed regarding her slyly, folded in upon itself and looking, apart from the green judgmental eyes, like an old-fashioned white fur muff that had been flung down by a petulant child.
Inside, outside. The private and the public. Rear Window revisited. This is no dream, this is real. New York films, New York apartments. Rosemary’s Baby. But the artists’ films are different; there is no narrative thread to follow. The woman in the film Clara imagines isn’t acting, didn’t even know she was being filmed.
Except that now she, Clara, is betraying a certain self-consciousness, striking casual poses that are designed to show off her body to the best effect. She is sucking in her tummy, holding the muscles taut. It is pleasant to imagine these things, her presence here, now, translated into something that is more th
an herself. Her loneliness becomes mythic, no longer hers alone, it belongs to everyone.
But wouldn’t the artist have to ask her permission before he showed the work? Wouldn’t there be a release form she’d have to sign?
On the other end of the line Kasper’s tone of voice has changed, there is a falling-away sound to it and so she pays attention. Listens.
Kaspar is saying, ‘Okay then, so I’ll see you there?’
‘It’s cold out,’ she says.
‘Yeah?’ he says, his voice rich with sarcasm.
‘So why don’t you just come here?’
‘See you by the screaming man, ten o’clock.’
He hangs up.
Time to dress. Time to go back to the start.
Kaspar. Sometimes she suspects that’s not his real name. It’s probably Brad or Henry or Edward.
He told her his age was thirty-two, but she suspects that’s a lie too, that he’s younger. His hair, though, is thinning on the back of his head. She believes he is not aware of this. She won’t tell him, not now, not yet. She’ll save that for some future time when she is angry with him. When they are throwing insults at each other. When they have run out of art, exhausted desire and are left with nothing except the capacity to hurt one another.
Best British Short Stories 2018 Page 9
