Authors: Jude Cook
Once again, we sat on the orange bucket seats, her head on my shoulder. She told me how she hated hospitals because they reminded her of having to visit the morgue after her mother’s crash. How Ramona had said only a month before, ‘If something happens to me, you will bring me flowers, won’t you darling?’, and the terrible guilt she felt for not visiting the grave in two years. After the suspicious, recalcitrant nurses had ejected us from the surgery cubicle, I said to her, ‘You need a lot of love. More love than three cats and one man can give you.’ To this she just smiled. She knew I was hooked, like a twitching fish on a line.
Certain songs have a Proustian effect on me, and, for that summer, it has to be Edwyn Collins’ ‘A Girl like You’. Apposite, I know. All I have to do is hear the dark voodoo of that subterranean minor chord and I get the works, like poor Swann, in an involuntary rush. One afternoon in particular—one deep July interlude of coruscating heat and rare indium—will always be conjured up by that tune, and probably will be for ever until its tape is erased by whatever gunshot, multiple pile-up or agonising illness brings me the end I so richly deserve. We were lounging on Mandy’s spacious futon, an exquisitely gentle breeze fingertipping our foreheads; the champagne breakfast over with (she treated me so well!); the conversation stalled for the moment; her mother’s photos watching us sadly from the mantelpiece. And I remember thinking: this is as good as it gets. Yes, this really is as good as it (this life, this plane of being) ever gets—hold on to it, carry it with you down every street you wind, like a precious desiccated flower, like Bergman’s precariously brimming bowl of milk. And I remember hoisting myself up at the teeming open window by the bed to contemplate the stripes of sun on the chaotic Holloway Road. The cars zipping home or away from home; the glory of light in the fully borne, fully complected trees. And I knew that the moment would be fixed, branded, tattooed on the retinas by the glare along the windowsills and in the branches—a second or two of high balance: the leaves so sympathetic to the sun, the sun so sympathetic to the leaves.
Given the amount of time I was spending at Mandy’s it’s a wonder I didn’t feel worse, or more guilty, than I did. It wasn’t that I was mumbling to Bea about where the apple-red smudge of a lovebite on the throat originated from, or why my trousers were on back-to-front for the third weekend in a row. In fact, no explanations seemed required of me. We had been seeing less and less of each other. I suppose the answer was simple: I was falling in love. I was becoming enmeshed in that fatal balance, that feted curiosity that two can feel for each other; that doomed parity that has to be seen through.
I remember the exact moment I
did
fall in love with her. It was late on another sybaritic afternoon in August when Mandy leapt from the sofa with a sexy, unselfconscious scream to answer the phone. She rejoined me on the limo-settee and proceeded to speak crackling Catalan down the receiver to her aunt Leo in Tarragona. That’s
it
, I thought. I’m smitten, I’m under. I watched her there: me blissfully ignorant of every syllable; her all red dust and ochre thighs, liquorice eyebrows and taxi-black hair, midday matadors and snapping castanets.
Once she put the phone down she became melancholy, as was often the case after talking to her relatives in Spain. I gathered that she had asked for a loan and had been turned down.
‘If only my mum hadn’t gone and
died
on me,’ said Mandy, yanking her hair into a tight knot at the crown and searching for an elastic band.
‘She didn’t mean to,’ I offered pathetically.
I watched her ransack her dressing table with a kind of helpless admiration. A white summer butterfly flitted in briefly through the open window, then left.
‘She’d help me out, I know it. Leocadia and Gran—they’re okay, they’re over there, in the sun. They’re just
bitches
.’
And then she started to cry. You got that sometimes with Mandy: a sense of dangerous scorn, of almost psychotic venom. As far as I could make out, she’d had all the help money could buy: a bereavement counsellor, a full-time therapist, doting boyfriends whom she gleefully gave the push one after another, a flash father with dodgy loot coming out of his ears, friends who’d do anything for her, a loyal auntie and grandmother in Tarragona. Yes, you sometimes caught the breath of that, her viridian life-force coming back the other way, alchemised into hate, her natural and pragmatic energy now a black gust of negativity; an ill wind that would blow nobody any good.
‘You’re like me,’ I said, getting up to help her locate the box of Kleenex I knew she was searching for. ‘You get low in the afternoons.’ I felt newly uxorious, attentive.
‘The time of day has hardly got anything to do with it,’ she said bitterly. Then she smiled, accepting my tentative arm around her still-shaking shoulders. ‘Anyway, you don’t seem like the type to get depressed.’
‘See, that’s where you’d be wrong. I’m not a bright guy.’
At this she laughed; a high, gazelle-quick cackle that seemed to come at me along the doorway-wide strokes of sunlight pouring through the open sashes. We looked at each other and without any warning started kissing. The first one. The one you will always remember. The one that will, at some point in the future, return with Francesca’s terrible words: ‘The bitterest woe of woes is to remember in our wretchedness the happiest times.’ Then we embraced, so close I could feel the crackle of roots as I ran my fingers from her crown down the divide of her middle parting and onto the alien surfaces of her forehead scar.
‘What’s so funny?’ I asked, wanting only a kiss for an answer.
But she didn’t kiss me. Instead she made a kind of proposition, or bribe, one that I would always recall in the black nights of the future, when I would measure what I’d
got
with what had originally been
promised
.
‘Why don’t you leave that Bea? Out of both of us, I’d love you better. Come on—stay with me and you’ll have … lots of fun, lots of sex.’
And as she fixed me with her fully engrossed, fully dilated Latin stare I knew I was done for.
‘It’s great to see a man able to cry,’ announces the Accountant Woman to her husband. ‘You know—openly.’
I am sitting on the hurtling, fevered train, staring at the pale faces opposite me. Until a moment ago I had been lost in that first kiss, that epidemic summer. And, obviously, weeping. Oh, I forgot to tell you. I made friends with them. The Accountant Couple, that is. Well, they say it’s often the people closest to you that you fail to notice. They’re not accountants after all. She is a counsellor, and he is a mortgage advisor. They had to be, didn’t they? Or something similar, something crushingly plausible. Where have all the artists gone? The chisellers and ink-dippers? The mad-haired prodigies of poetry? Michelle and Robin: happily married since last July, apparently. First baby planned for next year. After she offered me that Kleenex we got chatting. Now she’s looking back and forth between me and the sceptical face of her husband. I feel he needs to speak; to save my embarrassment, my smashed dignity. He rakes a hand through the brilliantined sweep of his hair.
‘Well, you can’t get much more open than that,’ says Robin, restoring some masculine straightforwardness to the slightly Californian atmosphere that has gathered over the intimate space of our table.
Michelle squeezes his hand, and he returns the gesture. I wince at this touching display. Her emaciated face turns towards me. ‘Well, I think it’s sweet. And very brave.’
‘I’m all right now,’ I manage to moan with a smile; childish snot on my T-shirt.
‘At least she didn’t do the dirty on you,’ grins Robin, warming to his subject. ‘Now, my uncle—’
‘Don’t tell him about all that!’
‘No, go ahead. I need cheering up.’
Robin continues, a certain relish now present in his voice. ‘—my uncle, he got hitched at the ripe old age of fifty-five to this younger bird. Asking for trouble. Anyway, he was a joiner, so he was at his workshop all the hours God sent. What does his missus start doing? Having all these blokes round, fellas she’s been to college with …’
I begin to tune his voice out. It’s necessary. Some things are necessary to one’s survival. I start to wipe the mucus from my chest, then give up and glance at the dark window. Outside I can see the ring of the horizon and its veil of rain; cold showers on steep streets and roofs; the hum of raw weather. Inside, this terrible pain in my heart. Mandy or Bea—what a choice I had to make. I watch the mysterious distances slowly revealing themselves with a stately motion: telegraphed, pyloned, oaked and copsed, with silver birches flashing close to the mad chatter of the rails. How does the song go?
Crashing headlong into the heartland … in a night that’s full of soul!
All of England seen at once, as if viewed from the air, or in section; or in every epoch, its secrets quiet within the rings of ancient trees, incontinent hedgerows. ‘… Anyway, while he’s holed up at his workshop waiting for this hurricane or storm that never happens, she’s having it away with this
student
…’ Late gulls on thermals escort us effortlessly, suddenly peeling off and dive-bombing a lake—streaking Stukas in the winter dusk. There’s the movement of wind in skeletal trees; as old a movement as you could hope to observe. Then the sudden disruption of a sewage works. At this speed, the landscape has the power to change within seconds; from broadly plotted squares of farmland to concave valleys hiding steeples amid the tops of rotting elms. ‘… and then when this other fella tries it on, he gets a right kick up the arse. My poor old uncle didn’t even get a look-in …’ The towns tumbling past show the last of England; what was once Saxon woodland tamed into arable sweeps dominated by the six-armed kings of the pylons. ‘… Terrible, ain’t it …?’
Mandy or Bea? That decision, as I remember, couldn’t be deferred for a moment longer.
‘Yeah,’ I mumble distractedly. ‘It’s the old story.’
September. A gloomy morning of showers. The second of September, six months after meeting Mandy, and I was rendezvousing with Bea to tell her goodbye. It had to be done. We sat together on a bench in Regent’s Park as the sun came out briefly over the branches and the rain-puddled walkways. It was the saddest morning of my life.
‘We didn’t promise each other anything, did we?’ I asked, looking at her pale profile. Her brow wrinkled slightly at this; her plum-coloured eyes deep-set, full of what I thought was thwarted feeling. But it was always hard to tell with Bea.
‘No, we didn’t. I suppose that was partly my fault, most of the time. So you’re in love with this—what’s her name again?’
‘Mandy,’ I mumbled, and felt the full error of what I was doing in the utterance of those two awful syllables.
I had told her all about Mandy, about my infatuation, how I thought the weekend-thing between myself and her was going nowhere. Or rather, I had rehearsed the plain transmission of these facts beforehand, but had garbled them out backwards in the last half hour between bursts of rain. Now I merely felt abysmal, like a murderer; the abortionist of our nascent love. The sun had just come out, turning all the walkways white with early autumn glitter.
‘So I’ll have no one then,’ she said, with a steady voice.
I had no answer to this. I saw all her loneliness then, in her upturned chin, her delicate Adam’s apple under its precious film of skin. I immediately felt, in my sternum, in my faithless loins, how close we had become, mentally and physically. Putting an end to our relationship felt like killing something inside us both. A brutal act. Sometimes it is only when you cross an invisible line that you precipitate the disclosure of another’s feelings, not to mention your own. Now her look was imploring, vulnerable, impossibly alive. I thought I would have to split up with her every day in order to arouse these emotions. Only years later did I recall sentences of hers that took on greater significance. One evening, as we lay naked on my crocheted bed-spread, my feather fingers lightly stroking her pussy, she said, ‘I think I’m going to start purring.’ Then, in a quiet voice, ‘I do like you, you know … more than you know.’ She said no such sentence in Regent’s Park, but it was immediately manifest in her eyes.
‘You’ll be okay. There’s your master’s, all those new friends up in Hampstead. You know, despite all this, I think we’ll always be friends.’
I looked far into the middle distance at these words. The classic words. I badly wanted this outcome, but I didn’t see how it would be possible with brash, aggressive Mandy around. The sun disappeared suddenly behind a rearing, bruised cloud. The indifferent squirrels with their spasmodic watchfulness, gnawing on their acorns, were only witnessing another couple split up in their park, unaware of the flames that consume human hearts.
‘Yes,’ she said, and I felt true assent, true hope and feeling in her voice. ‘We will always be friends. Maybe what we had was just sex.’ And her eyes reverted to their abstract, unreadable depths.
The rain started again. Pelting drops hit the bench, the size of amulets. Bea put her brolly up, and I walked her back to the road; finally unable to give her the protection I had vainly offered. Within the church-like sanctum of the umbrella, sheltering us both from the drumming downpour, I said, ‘You will always mean everything to me. All love, all beauty.’
Unsurprisingly, this rankled more than anything.
‘That’s just someone else’s poetry, Byron. I’m only a girl you met at a party who’s doing a post-graduate course. That’s part of the problem. You had me on a pedestal.’ But she was wrong (as well as one hundred per cent correct). I looked at her then and she seemed to show a God-like bearing—the raindrops dripping from the brim of the brolly instead of tears; her level, candid gaze: a stillness at the centre of a world turning in futile revolutions.
At the road junction we stopped and she kissed me on the lips. Please, no more, I thought. She gave my hand a warm squeeze and asked,
‘So you want a clean break then?’
‘A clean break. Yes.’
‘That’s really horrible,’ she said quietly. I apprehended at once a crucial difference between people. Not everyone needed to pick up the megaphone when undergoing intense pain. I had attributed to her a lack of feeling in the absence of my own glib, hysterical displays, but I had got her all wrong. I felt chastened that someone could have a subtler sensibility than me. Fundamentally, I had misunderstood her mechanism. Some people express titanic emotions, grave loss, in unostentatious, unobtrusive language. In no way does it diminish their depth of feeling. But then her behaviour was always understated, always impeccable. Here was a woman, I thought, who would never strike me, never say a sour word without mitigating it with love, who only wanted a steady man to provide her with protection, warmth, children, romance. And here I was throwing it away. As I returned her hand-squeeze, the words of the Soft Cell song swarmed into my head: ‘Take a look at my face, for the last time. I never knew you, you never knew me. Say hello, wave …’