Athena (26 page)

I saw A. everywhere, of course, just as I had done in the first days, after that first kiss. The streets were thronged with the ghost of her. The world of women had dwindled to a single image. There were certain places where I felt her presence so strongly I was convinced that if I stood for long enough, shivering in anguish, she would surely appear, conjured by the force of my longing. In Swan Alley there was a narrow archway beside a chip shop, it must at one time have been the entrance to something but was bricked
off now, where buddleia grew and feral cats congregated, and where one dreamy November twilight we had made awkward, desperate, breath-taking love, standing in our coats and holding on to each other like climbers roped together falling through endless air locked in a last embrace. There I would loiter now, obscurely glad of the squalor, trying to make her appear; and one evening, huddled in the shadows under the archway, racked by sobs, I opened my coat and masturbated into the chip shop’s grease-caked dustbin, gagging on her name.

This is all confused, I know, unfocused and confused and other near-anagrams indicating distress. But that is how I want it to be, all smeary with tears and lymph and squirming spawn and glass-green mucus: my snail-trail.

Barbarossa was still living in his box. I was surprised he had survived so far into the winter, huddled there in the cutler’s doorway. I suppose he was pickled by now, preserved, like a homunculus in its jar of alcohol. How even the frailest things could endure, as if to mock me! It was surprising too that the owner of the shop had not had him shifted; it could not have been good for business, to have a character like that living on your doorstep, even if he was careful to absent himself discreetly during business hours. But the derelicts in general, I noticed, seemed to be getting more impudent every day, encroaching more and more upon the city, moving out of the back alleyways into the squares and thoroughfares, bold as brass, colonising the place. At the cocktail hour they would gather with their bottles around an oily, dangerous-looking fire on that bit of waste ground by the bus depot and sing and fight and shout abuse at passers-by. Even when they approached me individually they could be surprisingly truculent. One of them accosted me in Fawn Street one evening, big strapping young fellow with a mouthful of crooked teeth, planted himself in my path with his hand stuck out and said nothing, just glared at
me with one eye rolling like the eye of a maddened horse and would not let me pass. There was no one else about and for a minute I thought he might haul off and take a swing at me. Breath like a furnace blast and the skin of his face glazed and blackened as if a flaming torch had been thrust into it. Alarming, I can tell you. Why is it so hard to look a beggar in the eye? Afraid of seeing myself there? No; it’s more a sort of general embarrassment, not just for him but for all of us, if that does not sound too grand. I gave him a coin and made a feeble joke about not squandering it on food and heard myself laugh and hurried on discomfited and obscurely shamed. Instead of which, of course, I should have taken him tenderly in my arms and breathed deep his noxious stink and cried,
‘My friend, my fellow sufferer!’
as the misanthropic sage of Dresden recommends.

Barbarossa had abandoned the tricolour cap A. had liked so much in favour of a much less picturesque, imitation-leather affair with ear-flaps. Also he sported now a rather natty pair of pinstriped trousers, the kind that hotel porters wear or ambassadors when they are presenting their credentials. I should very much like to know the history of that particular pair of bags. By the way, that beard of his: it did not seem to grow at all, I wonder why; or perhaps it did and I just did not notice it because I saw him every day? His girth was steadily increasing, I noticed that. On what was he growing so rotund? I never saw him eating anything, and the rotgut wine or sherry or whatever it was that he drank – always demurely jacketed in its brown-paper bag – surely could not be so nourishing that it would make him into this roly-poly, Falstaff figure? Perhaps, I thought, he was like those starving black babies one sees so many distressing pictures of these days, their little bellies swollen tight from hunger. He had a fixed course that he followed daily, squaring off the quarter in his burdened, back-tracking way: down Gabriel Street, across Swan Alley into Dog Lane, then along
Fawn Street and under the archway there on to the quays, then into Black Street and Hope Alley and down the lane beside The Boatman and so back into Gabriel Street, as the day failed and the shops began to shut and lights came on in uncurtained upper windows, though never in ours, my love, never in ours.

I have a confession to make. One night when I was passing Barbarossa’s doorway I stopped and gave him a terrible kick. I can’t think why I did it; it’s not as if he were doing me any harm. He was lying there, asleep, I suppose, if he did sleep, wrapped up in his rags, a big, awful bundle in the shadows, and I just drew back my foot and gave him one in the kidneys, or kidney, as hard as I dared. He had a dense, soggy feel to him; it was like kicking a sack of grain. He hardly stirred, did not even turn his head to see who it was that had thus senselessly assaulted him, and gave a short groan, more of gloomy annoyance, I thought, than pain or surprise, as if I had done no more than disturb him in the midst of a pleasant dream. I stood a moment irresolute and then walked on, not sure that the thing had happened at all or if I had imagined it. But it did happen, I did kick the poor brute, for no reason other than pure badness. So much violence in me still, unassuaged.

What
are
those damn pipes for? I cannot say. Not everything means something, even in this world.

One afternoon I witnessed a touching encounter. Iron-grey weather with wind and thin rain like umbrella-spokes. Barbarossa on his rounds turns a corner into Hope Alley and finds himself face to face with Quasimodo and rears back in obvious consternation and displeasure. They must know each other! I halt too, and skulk in a doorway, anxious not to miss a thing. The hunchback gives the burdened one an eager, sweet, complicitous smile, but Barbarossa, clutching to him his fistful of pipes, pushes past him with a scowl.
Quasimodo, rebuked and near to tears, hurries on with his head down.
Compagnon de misère!

In those terrible weeks I spent much of my time by the river, especially after nightfall. I liked to feel the heave and surge of water – for in the dark of course one senses rather than sees it – coiling past me like a vast, fat, undulant animal hurrying to somewhere, intent and silent, the slippery lights of the city rolling swiftly along its back. I’m sure I must have seemed a potential suicide, hunched there staring out haggard-eyed from the embankment wall with my misery wrapped around me like a cloak. I would not have been surprised if some night some busybody had grabbed me by the arm, convinced I was about to throw a leg over and go in.
Do not do it, my friend
, they would have cried,
I beseech you, think of all that you will be losing!
As if I had not lost all already.

But I knew I must not give in to self-pity. I had nothing to pity myself for. She had been mine for a time, and now she was gone. Gone, but alive, in whatever form life might have taken for her, and from the start that was supposed to be my task: to give her life. Come live in me, I had said, and be my love. Intending, of course, whether I knew it or not, that I in turn would live in her. What I had not bargained for was that this life I was so eager she should embark on would require me in the end to relinquish her. No, that was the wrinkle I had not thought of. Now there I stood, in the midst of winter, a forlorn Baron Frankenstein, holding in my hands the cast-off bandages and the cold electrodes and wondering what Alpine fastnesses she was wandering in, what icy wastes she might be traversing.

When I heard Aunt Corky had left me her money I bought champagne for the girls at No. 23 to celebrate my windfall. Yes, I had begun to go there again, but mostly for company, now. I saw myself as one of Lautrec’s old roués, debouching from a barouche and doffing my stovepipe to the pinched
faces watching with feigned eagerness at the windows. I liked to sit in the parlour chatting in the early evening while business was still unbrisk. I think the girls looked on me as their mascot, their safe man. In their company I glimpsed a simpler, more natural life: does that seem perverse? And of course there were the memories of you there, flickering in the dimness of those mean rooms like shadows thrown by a wavering candle-flame. That day after the reading of the will, when I arrived with my clanking bag of bottles, the place did its best to stir itself out of its afternoon lethargy and we had a little party. I got skittishly drunk and thus fortified had the courage at last to approach Rosie again, our Rosie. She is, I realise, beautiful, in her ravaged way; she has wonderful legs, very long and muscular, with shapely knees, a rare feature, in my admittedly limited experience. Also her skin has that curiously soiled, muddy sheen to it that I find mysteriously exciting (perhaps it reminds me of the feel of you?); this skin tone is the effect of cigarettes, I suspect, for she is a great smoker, unlike you a real addict, going at the fags like billy-o, almost angrily, as if it were an irksome task that had been imposed on her along with the rest of her burdens. At first she was guarded; she remembered me, and asked after you; I lied. She was still wearing that safety pin in her ear; I wondered idly if she took it out at night. Presently the bubbly began to take effect and she told me her story, in that offhand, grimly scoffing way they adopt when speaking about themselves. It was the usual tale: child bride, a drunken husband who ran off, kids to rear, job at the factory that folded, then her friend suggested she give the game a try and here she was. She laughed phlegmily. We were in what Mrs Murphy calls the parlour. Rosie looked about her at the cretonne curtains and lumpy armchairs and the oilcloth-covered table and expelled contemptuous twin steams of smoke through flared nostrils. ‘Better here than on the streets at least,’ she said. I put my hand on her thigh.
She was a raw, hard, worn working girl, your opposite in every way, and just what I thought I needed at that moment. But it was not a success. When we went upstairs and lay down on the meagre bed – how quickly these professionals can get out of their clothes! – she ground her hips against mine in a perfunctory simulacrum of passion and afterwards yawned mightily, showing me a mouthful of fillings and breathing a warm, sallow fug of stale tobacco-fumes in my face. She had been better as a witness than a participant. Yet in the melancholy afterglow as I lay on my stomach with chin on hands and the length of her cool, goosefleshed flank pressed against mine – I think she had dropped off for a moment – and looked out through the gap under the curtain at the shivery lights along Black Street I felt a pang of the old, fearful happiness and gave her a hug of gratitude and fond fellowship, to which she responded with a sleepy groan. (None of this is quite right, of course, or quite honest; in truth, I remain in awe of this tough young woman, cowering before her breathless with excitement and fright, trembling in the conviction of enormous, inabsolvable transgression; it might be my mother I am consorting with, as Rosie wields me, her big baby, with a distracted tenderness that carries me back irresistibly to the hot, huddled world of infanthood. Deep waters, these; murky and deep. She has a scar across her lower belly knobbled and hard like a length of knotted nylon string; caesarean section, I presume. What a lot of living she has done in her twenty years. I hope, by the way, I have made you jealous; I hope you are suffering.)

How powerfully affecting they are, though, these reflexive moments when you not only feel something but also feel yourself feeling it. As I lay on that frowsty bed in Ma Murphy’s gazing down at that strip of windswept night street I had a kind of out-of-body experience, seeming to be both myself and the trembling image of myself, as if my own little ghost had materialised there, conjured out of equal
measures of stark self-awareness on one side and on the other the fearful acknowledgment of all there was that I was not. Me and my ectoplasm. And yet at the same time at moments such as this I have the notion of myself as a singular figure, a man heroically alone, learned in the arts of solitude and making-do, one with those silent, tense characters you come across of a night standing motionless in the hard-edged, angled shadows of shop doorways or sitting alone in softly purring parked cars and who make you jump when you catch sight of them, their haunted eyes and glowing cigarette-tips flaring at you briefly out of the dark.
Esse est percipi
. And vice versa (that is,
to see is to cause to be
; how would I put that into bog Latin?) You see what you have done to me by your going? You have made me an habitué of this flickering, nocturnal demi-monde I was always afraid I would end up in at the last. Oh, I know, at heart I was ever a loner – who, at heart, is not? – but that was different to this. This is another kind of isolation, one I have not experienced before.

Yet I am not what you could properly call alone. There is a sort of awful, inescapable intimacy among us solitaries. I know all the signs by now, the furtive, involuntary signals by which the members of our brotherhood recognise each other: the glance in the street that is quickly averted, the foot tensely tapping amid the straggle of pedestrians waiting on the windy corner for the lights to change and the little green man to appear (the emblem of our kind, our very mascot!), the particular presence behind me in the supermarket queue: a pent, breathy silence at my shoulder that seems always about to break out into impossible babblings and never does. Children of the dark, we make diurnal night for ourselves in the bare back rooms of pubs, in the echoing gloom of public libraries and picture galleries, in churches, even – churches, I have noticed, are for some reason especially popular when it rains. Our favourite haunt, however, our happiest home, is the afternoon cinema. As we sit
star-scattered there in that velvety dark, the lonely and the lovelorn, the quiet cranks and mild lunatics and serial killers-in-waiting, all with our pallid faces lifted to the lighted screen, we might be in the womb again, listening in amazement to news from the big world outside, hearing its cries and gaudy laughter, watching huge mouths move and speak and feed on other mouths, seeing the gun-barrels blaze and the bright blood flow, feeling the beat of life itself all around and yet beyond us. I love to loll dreamily there, lost to all sense, and let the images play over me like music, as you materialise enormously in these moving sculptures with their impossible hair and bee-stung lips and rippling, honeyed flanks. Where are you. Tell me. Where are you. What we see up there are not these tawdry scenes made to divert and pacify just such as we: it is ourselves reflected that we behold, the mad dream of ourselves, of what we might have been as well as what we have become, the familiar story that has gone strange, the plot that at first seemed so promising and now has fascinatingly unravelled. Out of these images we manufacture selves wholly improbable that yet sustain us for an hour or two, then we stumble out blinking into the light and are again what we always were, and weep inwardly for all that we never had yet feel convinced we have lost.