All the Rage (10 page)

Piccadilly Line: convenient and it's my favourite shade of blue.

He'd stepped into an empty carriage.

And she followed.

That was you.

That was you, Emily.

That was you.

She'd sat opposite, a tiny clumsiness in her movements that lit him, put him on alert, even though she'd been unremarkable in many ways.

Sweet Jesus, that was you.

An over-large biker jacket had made her seem round-shouldered.

As if she was shy about having breasts.

Emily.

That was sweet and you.

Her costume fought ungracefully to combine revelation with concealment. She'd made a series of unimaginative and self-punishing choices in red and mainly black: holed black tights and layers of equally wounded T-shirts, short denim shorts and high-lacing boots with industrial soles. One hand was curled intently round a can of cider.

Didn't know your name, but that was sweet and you.

Mark had watched her face, its flickers and hints as it flirted with insecurity, or gave him little signs of pride – the happy and personal victory that was her cider, the wish to be challenging.

Lowered eyes and faking that I wasn't there for you, but I already was. Immediately.

And then she made a small retreat into hurts, or the threat of hurts, their memory, and into some variety of fear. He'd shivered with a vast and irrational compulsion to disclose and remove every wound for her.

Sweet you.

Now and then she had the expression of someone preserved in an untouched space, of dispassionate observation. Her skin was pale as paper and not especially clean and clearly the cider was there to help her up out of the night before, to remove a disreputable pain, but there was so, so much strange purity there, too. He would come to define this sanctity and distance as her principal characteristics. That morning they simply caught him, along with the rest. She was twenty-two – not genuinely young – but the grace of childhood hadn't faded on her.

Like all the proper ones – the real alcoholics, before they blow – she had this weird perfection, was flawless because of her flaws and made them a beauty.

She was angelic.

Stupid word.

My angel.

Shining with each of the obvious violations.

She was self-inflicted.

He had known how catastrophic she would be, a coma patient could have realised that Emily was dangerous. He hadn't been deterred.

Quite the reverse.

The first thing she'd said to him was ‘Perv'. But she'd made it sound affectionate – warm and for him in the empty carriage – and they'd stayed where they were, discarded any prior plans and ridden out to the terminals at Heathrow – not particularly speaking, only being with each other, rocking onwards inside the shudders of the carriage. The seats around them gently silted up with voyagers and their unwieldy bags and then mostly emptied as people Mark felt were entirely unnecessary left for exciting, or happy, or business-related destinations. By Turnham Green she'd come to him, switched places and sat at his side.

On their way back into town – the line had returned them, as if it approved of Mark's intentions – he'd taken her hand, completely unsure of whether she'd consent. He hadn't a clue how to play her.

She stole my game.

But by Covent Garden he'd risked standing and leading her out and away through the station and up to the fast-breathing world.

There I was with Emily and the sky not the same as it had been and the structure of myself softly altering and rampaging.

He'd found them a fairly quiet bar where he drank cider with her – he detested cider – so their mouths would taste the same.

I knew wherever she lived would be appalling and indiscreet, so I picked her a hotel.

Without bags, unwieldy or otherwise, I got to enjoy an amount of lying at the check-in desk. They sold me a pair of toothbrushes to replace the ones we hadn't lost in a spurious suitcase that hadn't been misdirected to Tenerife. I held both the brushes together in one hand, made sure they touched as we strolled to the lift.

All concerned were under no illusions about what we were going to do.

She didn't seem to mind and didn't seem not to.

Three weeks after my fortieth birthday and I got myself a twenty-two-year-old.

Or she got me.

Beyond the fantasy luggage, I didn't lie about anything else when I was with her. I made it a rule from then on. I told her about Pauline. I told her I'd have to leave way before the morning. I told her about my habits. I told her about me.

It was a first.

Nothing changed.

Nothing was absolutely changed.

Almost immediately, his enthusiasm for the others dissipated. He had a handful of repeat offenders, but he simply didn't ring them any more and, as a consequence, they drifted. He'd been a man who was mainly attracted to passing trade and he let it pass.

He had Emily.

It was a devotion of sorts.

There were slippery, sick days when she didn't answer his calls. She never explained why. He decided to assume the problem was related to technical issues and bought her a new phone. It was pink, which made it a joke, but he also meant it very much and didn't want her to lose it – hence the ghastly colour. Before he handed it over, he'd stood in the shop and nestled the thing beside his cheek.

Hello. You'll be here and my voice in your hands.

But mainly she was quite reliable and willing to meet him at various hotels near Euston, or King's Cross – his choice – suitably anonymous and seedy establishments.

Perhaps the only thing that limited how often they could be together was his ability to hide the cost of this or that dog-eared double room.

Perhaps he believed he would be lost if he saw her too frequently.

Because she was wholly willing. She gave him the purgatory of that.

Her acceptance – unrelenting acceptance – put a terror in his blood, a type of recurring vertigo. Whatever he requested, she would do: she would dress as he dictated, with barely a hesitation. She would be naked – he was very predictable – beneath her coat and visit bars with him in Loughborough Junction, Ealing, Hampton, places where he wouldn't be known.

Hand slipped between her buttons in a cab coming back from Croydon and what I found, what I found, the deep sweet, my best girl's ache.

Laughing in another hotel lift, on the rise, not being what you'd call subtle.

He explored her with harsh appetites for which he blamed her and also thanked her and also blamed her, helplessly punishing and offering. He possessed each access to her, tired her and she allowed him. He tied her up and took advantage, bought a dedicated camera for recording the indignities and marvels, her splendours.

For several months he stripped and beat her on each of their nights and she made no objection, made no sound. He didn't intend to hurt her, but spanking was insufficient, so the shameful slap of his belt carried, no doubt, into neighbouring rooms, as did his own cries, his attempts to destroy her silence.

Which was the last straw.

In the end, her acquiescence broke his ingenuity.

Emily made a new nothing. She made it permanent.

He didn't want to hit her, he simply couldn't shake his desperation to leave her marked. Anyone else who undressed her afterwards would find the parallel bruises he had made, not extreme, but unmistakable. Because apparently he had the right. And, without him, she'd remain his statement – not of ownership, he promised her, but of love. He would bite her for similar reasons and hate that he had to and hate who he was.

‘Is there anyone? Emily?'

‘No.'

‘Look at me, though. Look at me and tell me there's no one else.'

‘There's no one else.'

‘Call me darling.'

‘Darling.'

And that distance in her eyes where she was unreachable and at her loveliest.

I knew there wasn't anybody else, there wasn't honestly even me.

‘You could say . . . If you would just say, Emily. It would be all right and I wouldn't be angry. I would just want you to tell me. Because I love you. Emily? You do know that, don't you?'

‘Yeah.'

‘I love you more than anything, and you're my real wife and you have to know that. You're the one that counts.'

Because she never mentioned love he dropped into harder and harder declarations until he couldn't bear to hear himself, would nuzzle between her breasts and try to be deafened by her heartbeat as it pounced beneath his ear.

‘Darling Mark.' The way a child would say it, or someone from another country, testing if they could.

‘Darling Emily. Thank you. Darling Emily.'

And when everything else was exhausted, he had to be alone with her and opened. ‘I would marry you if you asked. I would try and we could do that. We could. If you wanted. It would be complicated, but if you wanted.'

Although their initial excursions to bars delighted him, he learned he should steer her away from too much booze. Uncontrolled drinking made her bleak. Eventually he limited their rendezvous to the hotels, for her benefit. He did his best to care about her in that way and worried if she came to him unsteady or with her skin under that heavy sheen of previous alcohol. On evenings when she was too out of it, he kissed and held her and no more and was glad to feel her dreams shift in his arms. ‘Sweetheart, I have to go now, will you be okay? Are you okay? You should sleep. Keep asleep.'

I wanted to cure her.

I did right by her, almost constantly.

Only that one night when I let myself down. I fell.

I was closing the door, but I wanted to look at her, a parting glance: naked sprawl of my girl across our evidence, the disarray of a cheap fawn coverlet and dull white sheets, her bared feet towards me, plump. She was sleeping it off. She was sleeping me off.

‘Night-night, sweetheart.' When I'd kissed her forehead and each closed eye, she'd tasted only pure.

This couple had walked along the corridor at my back and I'd been so absorbed that I hadn't noticed.

And then I did.

And the three of us stood and I knew we were each one of us studying Emily.

I kept the door open – not for terribly long, a breath, a large instant – but I did give that much of her away. And it made me glad. I wanted them to understand that I could touch this angel and she'd got me.

She never knew and it didn't harm her, and then I locked her up safe and the couple moved on.

She was mine, proved mine.

Emily.

He would drive Pauline about – short trips – dance with her or face her at unamusing parties, nod while she talked in supermarket queues, lean near her at the kitchen sink while she washed the dishes and he dried – he did his best to be compliantly domestic when he could – and he would be tight in a fury of needing Emily.

Mine.

Unlike his previous lovers, Emily made him have increasingly emotional sex with his wife. He would weep against Pauline's neatly measured breathing and then have to agree to let her comfort him. His wife as a relief from the truth of fidelity – it was absurd.

Like staying in a railway station with no trains that we can catch.

Am I displaying hope or idiocy?

Are we? Or are we pretending this is acceptable, because we're in company?

In it together.

A problem shared is not a problem, it's a community.

And so forth.

We can't claim it wasn't more than possible to foresee – our likely future.

The fate of our nation.

And so forth.

I saw it. I stared at it, sort of, not for terribly long, a breath, a large instant.

Although I suspect my real focus was elsewhere. That's likely.

I wasn't alone in ignoring multiple warnings.

Even about trains.

As a student, he had decided he should seem to take an interest in the wider life. It enriched his social circle.

More girls.

His drive to be committedly well informed meant he'd attended a lecture by some playwright.

Face like a punched scatter cushion and a scholarship boy's accent.

A laughably earnest audience had squeezed into the studio theatre at the Barbican Centre and been subjected to the usual liberal/left stuff – here we are in 1984 and it's ever so much worse than the novel. Smug. The playwright cared. No one could match his extravagant caring, that was plain, and no one else had noticed and resisted the loss of their country's virtue with quite his intellectual elan.

His thesis was okay, though – quite elegant, if repetitive. Probably rehashed it for
The Guardian.
That's the way to make money: get paid for saying the same thing, over and over again
.

Sorrysorrysorrysorry.

But I'm the one who pays for that.

The playwright had made frequent and self-consciously lyrical returns to the break-up and sale of the nationalised railways.
Passengers
were no longer
passengers
, they were being redefined as
customers
.
Customers
were happy when they bought something, in this case a ticket.
Passengers
wanted to travel, have politically and economically significant mobility, but instead would have to settle for pieces of thin card and lots of waiting. Dissatisfaction was being rendered inarticulate by a maliciously transformed vocabulary.