Instead Quentina said,
‘Loading is taking place.’ She held out her hand and as in a dumb-show, the countryman and his daughter came out of the electrician’s struggling with a visibly heavy object wrapped in cardboard, which from its shape and dimensions was probably a fridge. With great effort they dropped this on the backboard of the Land Rover and began pushing it in.
‘Why don’t you just fuck off back to nig-nog land, go eat your fucking bananas in a tree and die of AIDS, you nigger bastard? Eh? What the fuck are you doing here anyway?’
‘Have a nice day, madam,’ said Quentina. She walked away, angry and sick but not surprised, and then did the thing experience had taught her to do: she turned, photographed the car and the loading bay (and as it happened the man and his daughter, who were now extracting another large package from the car, with difficulty, because it was partly wedged in by the fridge – they really weren’t very good at what they were doing). Then she took out her notebook and wrote down what the woman had said, and the time and place. Then she went about her business for the rest of the day, a day on which she had something to look forward to. So while there was no denying that the things which happened happened, there was always that other more important thing in the future. Mashinko … my humps …
Z
bigniew woke up and for a moment felt good. It was six, which was early, and a crack of light had come though a gap in the curtains and hit his face where it lay on the pillow – which was fine by Zbigniew, an early riser, a getter-up. His initial feeling on coming awake was a happy sense of busyness, with a day to be conquered, things to be done, tasks to be ticked off, progress to be made. He had three or four projects on the go. His stock portfolio was doing well. There was an English expression Zbigniew loved, a saying which was so good it could almost qualify as Polish: it’s a good life if you don’t weaken. So when he woke, while he was coming to full consciousness, Zbigniew had several seconds of being completely happy.
Then he felt that he was not alone in the bed. His body sensed it before his mind, that there was another body in the bed; he knew this as an animal knows it; and then he realised that he was not in his own bed; and then he knew who it was and where he was and what was happening, and he was immersed in a disconnection which had started out being a small thing, a joke, a quirk, but had escalated to the point where it was the bane of his day, the thing which was wrong with his life, the black sun overhead. His body was happy. He was in bed with Davina, the girl whom he had met in Uprising before Christmas. He had taken her out twice over the holiday, they had had sex for the first time in January, they had been seeing each other ever since. It was a
disaster. A disaster of a complicated type, and one which Zbigniew had never experienced before, because from one point of view, and one point of view only, he was ecstatically happy: his body liked what was happening. Right from the first time, when Davina had come screaming at exactly the moment he came into her, they had had amazing sex; the best sex of Zbigniew’s life. This was not a question of tricks or specific acts; it wasn’t any single thing Davina did that no other girl had ever done; it was just that they somehow worked together. It was hard not to reach for engineering metaphors. The mechanism simply worked. Perfectly. And repeatedly. Every time. It was, considered purely as sex, the best sex of his life: the most inventive, the dirtiest, the most satisfying, the noisiest. His body was crazy about what was happening.
The trouble was that his mind, his spirit, his soul, his feelings, were in convulsions. The thing was – he couldn’t stand Davina. He had noticed this at an early point, a very early point, indeed during their first conversation; if it came to that, he had noticed it before he even spoke to her, since she smoked and he couldn’t stand smoking, even if it did look sexy. He had mentioned this to her after a few weeks and – she had given up! There and then! That was how bad the situation was!
It wasn’t that Davina was overtly clingy. But she was completely, irrevocably dependent. He was her world; he knew that because she told him so. ‘You are my world.’ That made no sense to Zbigniew, as a thing to say, because it could never be true. People were people, one by one, individuals, and the world was the world. That was the whole point of it, that it was everything else. A person could not be your world. That was the whole point of what people and the world were.
The dependency, which appeared only after they had slept together for the first time, was a big issue. Every time they met – which if it had been up to her would be every day, in fact if it were up to her they would already have moved in together, in fact if it were up to her they would already be married – she would ask what he had been doing and wait on the answer with her eyes large, her mouth slightly parted, as if ready to be thrilled, amazed, aghast. There was a note of paranoia and jealousy there right from the start. She was jealous of his work, his
friends, his stock portfolio, Piotr, everything. She tried not to show it, or tried to show it in a way that looked like a convincing attempt not to show it.
All this, while obviously not all right, might have been bearable, if it were not for two other traits which interacted with and magnified each other. The first was her theatrical way of acting everything out. She did everything with a consciousness of being watched. She exaggerated everything she said or felt, often by pretending to underplay her reactions; this was a particularly epic phenomenon when she was pretending not to be hurt or upset. When Zbigniew had through pressure of work to cancel a ‘drink’, i.e. a bottle of wine followed by sex followed by a bitter contest over whether he stayed the night at her flat, the next time they met she would act like a cat greeting an owner who had gone on holiday: looking away, shrugging and saying ‘Nothing’ when he asked what was wrong, saying ‘Whatever’ to any suggestions or plans of any sort. (‘Shall I ask for the bill?’ ‘Whatever.’) Then there would be strenuous, tumultuous reconciliation sex.
The second trait, the one which finally meant that Zbigniew found his girlfriend impossible to be with for any time without wishing he were somewhere else, was her gloominess, what she called her ‘black dog’. (Even the way she said that, theatrically, looking down or away, as if the subject was too difficult, too painful, as if the very words themselves were a burden which a man as coarsely at ease with himself as Zbigniew would have difficulty imagining …) Once every three or four meetings, she would be lost in herself, barely able to speak – or that was how she acted. But her histrionic side meant that it was impossible to tell. She might not have had anything much on her mind at all, but just been wanting a little more attention – this is what he often thought was the case. Or she might have been a little bit down and needing cheering up, but instead of just asking for cheering up, she had decided to exaggerate how down she was on the basis that it was a more effective way of getting his attention, only to find that instead it had the effect of making him shut down, switch off, and turn away; which was what it did. Depressed people bored and annoyed Zbigniew; back home he knew too many of them, and their charms had long since
worn off. Or she might have been genuinely, but briefly, depressed – except that to be as depressed as she seemed, she would have to be clinically depressed, in which case what she needed was a doctor and some pills, not a Polish boyfriend to sit across the table and be unhappy at.
Last night, for instance. They had gone to see a film. The time before, she chose, so this time, he did.
Iron Man
. It was OK – not great but OK. Afterwards, in the pub, she did not speak. He made small talk for a while then gave up. After a couple of minutes, with Davina sitting there looking at the table, she looked up and said,
‘You’re very quiet.’
‘You are quieter than I am.’
Pause.
‘Am I?’
‘Yes.’
Pause.
‘Well … I just don’t feel there’s much to say.’
At which point Zbigniew might have taken the opportunity to say, I agree, it’s over. But instead he fell into the trap.
‘Why not?’
She shrugged – expressively, tragically, as if being forced to give a preference between death by hanging or shooting.
‘Is there?’
‘Isn’t there?’
Another shrug.
‘You like films like that … Violent films.’
So that was it.
‘It wasn’t that violent.’
She shuddered.
‘By your standards, maybe not.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You’re a man, you’re entertained by violence.’
‘No I’m not. I like action films. That’s not the same thing.’
‘When you have seen violence, though …’
So that would be the way it would go. Davina sometimes implied that she was a victim of violence in some private way linked to her
childhood (maybe) or to past boyfriends (maybe) or both. She never said anything explicit but would often drop hints and then fight off Zbigniew’s attempts to follow up and find out more. She preferred it when he made an effort to ask, so he said, while wondering just how he had been manoeuvred into asking a question when he didn’t want to hear the answer and wouldn’t necessarily believe it when it came,
‘What do you mean?’
That was when she went into her black dog mode. And guess what? – it ended up with them having sex: after he had walked her home, she had burst into tears and invited him in, and about thirty seconds later they were, to use an expression Zbigniew had picked up from an Irish electrician, ‘banging away like armed policemen’. The sex was great, of course. It was epic. It was the best it could be. Sex wasn’t the problem. Or rather, sex was exactly the problem, because it was so great.
Zbigniew got out of bed as carefully as he could manage. The ideal thing would be to get out of Davina’s flat without waking her, leaving behind a note expressing … expressing something. In his underpants, he made it to the en suite bathroom, where he splashed water on his face and brushed his teeth using the toothbrush she had bought for him. He pissed and – this was risky from the noise-making point of view but he was fastidious – flushed.
Back in the bedroom, he had a moment of not much liking himself. The room was bright pink – a stylish bright pink, Zbigniew had to admit – and had a large Ikea bed. Davina had a collection of teddy bears which, in the haste to have sex last night, had been thrown off onto the floor. They were in a variety of positions, legs akimbo, upside down, piled on top of each other, and the way they were strewn around, combined with what Zbigniew and Davina had done last night, made, for a jarring moment, Zbigniew think there was something sexual about their air of abandon. The bears looked forgotten and unloved, and also as if they were in the middle of a bear orgy. It looked wrong.
His clothes, also removed in a hurry, were on the heavy, ornate, very non-Ikea chair opposite the foot of the bed. He slipped on his T-shirt and sweatshirt, but one of his jeans legs was trapped under the leg of the chair. He lifted the chair with one hand and pulled out the jeans with the other, and heard from behind him,
‘Oooh, muscles.’
He grimaced, then turned and smiled.
‘I was hoping I wouldn’t wake you.’
‘I like being woken by you,’ she said in a sleepy-sexy voice, which he couldn’t help finding, despite himself, made him feel a twinge in his cock.
‘Last night was nice,’ said Zbigniew. She said nothing, only made a sleepy murmur. This was the best side of her and showed that she could indeed find the right tone. Davina hadn’t yet lifted her head and her streaked blonde hair was splayed out on the pillow. She was looking half-awake and thoroughly ready for more sex.
‘You’re hard to resist,’ said Zbigniew, saying in this light way a complicated true thing. Davina again said nothing, just pulled up the bottom of the duvet a little way so he could see her leg all the way up to mid-thigh, her swelling leg, her long leg, her warm leg, her leg which was so skinny at the ankle but which ripened so towards the thigh, her honey-coloured leg which Zbigniew knew from experience went all the way up …
He stepped towards the bed. Davina said mmmm.
S
mitty’s assistant was called Parker French, though that wasn’t how Smitty thought of him. As was his practice, Smitty thought of his assistant as his assistant. What they did mattered much more than who they were. In fact who they were was barely relevant; in so far as it was relevant, it was, in direct proportion, annoying. The more he had to notice his assistants as people, the less well they were doing their job. If he could have got away with it, he would have quite liked to do that thing of calling all his assistants by the same name. Nigel, say. His assistant would always be called Nigel. Every year or so there would be a new Nigel. Short Nigels, tall Nigels, hairy Nigels, skinhead Nigels, Rasta Nigels – but always, in the final analysis, Nigels. That would be funny.
Smitty’s assistant, however, didn’t think of himself as Smitty’s assistant. He thought of himself as Parker French. If Parker had known what Smitty thought of him, he would have been shocked and upset, but he would have nonetheless found out that he and his employer were in full agreement about one thing: Parker wouldn’t be Smitty’s assistant for ever.
A job like today’s was one reason for that. Smitty was going to a party, an art-world party. It was in a warehouse in Clapton, and was given by a gallery owner who had been one of the first and most alert about tracking the London art world’s relocation eastward. They had been onto Hoxton, onto Shoreditch, right as they were happening,
and now they were onto Clapton. The stuff on display was by one of their new clients, an up-and-coming pair of brothers who specialised in smashing things and then incorrectly gluing them back together. It wasn’t a question of whether they were going to be big. That was a given. It was only a question of just how big. For this first high-profile show, there were about ten small pieces and two big central works. The small pieces included a mound of four bicycles, some sofas, a fridge (that was quite funny because the doors had been glued on backwards), and some sets of golf clubs (also funny). In the middle stood one of their most controversial works, a number of paintings and artworks which they’d been given by other artists and which they’d chopped up and glued back together and given a one-word name three hundred and forty-four characters long which was all the individual titles of the artworks run together.
Hareonagreenshutteraftersoutineperformanceonesketchesincharcoallbaconwaswrongileftmymuminthecarparkpartsevenwinterdreampicturemehavingsexdoesmymumlookbiginthis?(canisterofherashes)knickerpaintingifyouwantmybodyinspiredbyphilipkdicknumbertwoselfportraitselfportraitselfportraitbyphotoshopspunkingupyoghurtpotbymoonlightshortfilmstilllifewithfish
was one big central piece, which had already been bought by a collector. Smitty quite liked it and quite liked the idea too. It was funny to think of how pissed off all the other artists must have been to have their work chopped up, while having to pretend to be cool about it. But that wasn’t his favourite piece in the show. The brothers had smashed a Ford Focus – or rather had found a chop shop to cut it apart – and glued it back together. The result was memorable, truly. It looked like a child’s idea of how you might assemble a car, executed by a giant whose hands were too big to make the necessary fine movements. Because bits of it stuck out and were added on at the last moment – bits that the brothers couldn’t fit in anywhere else – it also had something a little hedgehog-like about it. Everyone agreed that it was a very strong piece. It was called
Can There Ever Be a Politics of the Dream?
That was where the party had got its theme. The party was called Politics of the Dream, which was why there were sword-swallowers and fire-eaters by the warehouse door as people came in, and also why the waiters were dwarfs.