Collected Stories (13 page)

She had begun to guess about the rock’n’roll band and its effect on him. She had tried to tell him that it affected nothing, would affect nothing. But because he hadn’t really declared his fears there was no way she could successfully allay them.

He thought she was a Bedouin princess who would return to her own people.

She was an orphan with damp hands and bad dreams that she had postponed with wine and Valium and electric fears.

Sometimes she felt she had been invented by Leonard Cohen, whom she hated.

She regretted her letters to Evelyn.

She regretted the answers. She took the letters as they arrived and hid them where he wouldn’t find them.

But he found them and misinterpreted her reasons for hiding them.

She began to fear losing him.

She had made him hate his job. She had made him ashamed of his life. She had never told him that she loved him, that her eyes filled with tears watching him sleep, without her knowing why.

And she knew that he was plotting something. His dark face was as secretive as shuttered windows on winter mornings. When she kissed him he returned her kisses distractedly. When he got stoned
he looked miserable. And when he asked her about the amphetamines she knew it was because he thought she was a liar so she told him plainly, in detail, exactly where they were and she drew a plan that could not have been invented and explained that in the city in question there was an old quarter in which all the houses had disused interconnecting passages, a protection against seventeenth-century winters.

“Now do you believe me?” she said when she had finished.

“Yes, I believe you,” he said, without apparent conviction.

And although she should have guessed what was on his mind she didn’t, because he wasn’t interested in money, because drugs had no fascination for him, because he was unlike Carlos and had no need to prove himself in acts of machismo and because it was unthinkable that a gentle-faced amateur should attempt anything so patently foolish.

He said he was going to an architects’ convention in another city.

She knew he was lying and didn’t ask to come.

She knew he was going to fuck some lady who was more beautiful and more interesting than she was.

She bought him a mohair sweater in a very pale blue.

He had become more than slightly mad. His actions were dictated by a logic so strict that it allowed no variation. He was a sleepwalker strolling on the ledges of sixty-storey buildings. He was a beachcomber removing seashells from a minefield. He flew into a northern city, took a taxi to an address he had copied down, asked the taxi to wait and emerged in five minutes with a large crate.

In his hotel room he packed the contents of the crate into sixty small cardboard boxes and posted them to himself, to his home, to his office and to seven different suburban post offices in the town where he lived.

Not one of them was intercepted by customs. It had never occurred to him that they might be.

He had always wanted to take Polaroid photographs of her face to show her its incredible variety, most beautiful in laughter, most
childlike when solemn, ugly in tears, as mischievous as a gargoyle, as decadent as Bacchus.

But when finally, two weeks after he returned, he presented her with a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines, he was in no way prepared for the undiluted horror that widened her eyes and dropped her jaw and made her literally gasp for breath.

For she knew, as she looked at the peculiarly beautiful capsules with their pink and yellow stripes, that her haven had been ripped apart and laid waste.

She stared at him, shaking her head, not even trying to wonder how he had succeeded in doing what he had done.

She shivered in anger and despair.

He had understood nothing.

He had thought it was a game.

He had finally believed her story but he had never believed how serious it was.

He was standing in front of her now, smiling proudly, like a dog with a hand grenade in its mouth, wagging its tail.

Carlos had an ugly mouth. Carlos had treated her like shit. Carlos was stupid and vindictive and in jail. But he was also a businessman who had just been relieved of the biggest deal he had ever conceived. Carlos would kill a hundred men to get those little pills. He would do it tomorrow, or the next day, or next year, but he would do it.

There was nothing she could say to him. There was no advice she could offer him for his own safety. She could think only of her own survival. She felt ill. She could not even kiss him goodbye.

Clay dust falls from adobe walls and settles on slate floors, chairs, tables and filters through the cracks of a crate containing a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines which have never been discovered.

He tried one once, but it made him feel unpleasant.

In nights of Valium and wine he remembers times when he held her in his arms and pressed his body full of dreams.

She moves around the house on soft slow feet, her footsteps padding softly above me as I lie, on my unmade bed of unwashed sheets, listening. She knows, as she always knows, that I am listening to her and it is early morning. The fog has not risen. The traffic crawls outside. There is a red bus, I can see the top of it, outside the window. If I cared to look more closely I could see the faces of the people in the bus, and, with luck, my own reflection, or at least the reflection of my white hair, my one distinction. The mail has not yet arrived. There will be nothing for me, but I wait for it. Life is nothing without expectation. I am always first to pick up the letters when they drop through the door. The milk bottles, two days old, are in the kitchen unwashed and she knows this too, because she has not yet come.

Our relationship is beyond analysis. It was Bernard, although I prefer to name no names, who suggested that the relationship had a Boy Scout flavour about it. So much he knows. Bernard, who travels halfway across London to find the one priest who will forgive his incessant masturbation, cannot be regarded as an authority in this matter.

Outside the fog is thick, the way it is always meant to be in London, but seldom is, unless you live by the river, which I don’t. Today will not disappoint the American tourists.

And she walks above my head, probably arranging the little white dolls which she will not explain and which I never ask about, knowing she will not explain, and not for the moment wishing an explanation. She buys the dolls from the Portobello Road, the north end, on Friday morning, and at another market on Thursdays, she has not revealed where, but leaves early, at about 5 a.m. I know it is a market she goes to, but I don’t know which one. The dolls arrive in all conditions, crammed into a large cardboard suitcase which she takes out on her expeditions. Those which still have hair she plucks bald, and those with eyes lose them, and those with teeth have them removed and she paints them, slowly, white. She uses a flat plastic paint. I have seen the tins.

She arranges the dolls in unexpected places. So that, walking up the stairs a little drunk, one might be confronted with a collection of bald white dolls huddled together in a swarm. Her room, which was once my room, she has painted white; the babies merge into its walls and melt into the bedspread which is also white. White, which has become a fashionable colour of late, has no appeal to her, it is simply that it says nothing, being less melodramatic than black.

I must admit that I loathe white. I would prefer a nice blue, a pretty blue, like a blue sky. A powder blue, I think it is called. Or an eggshell blue. Something a little more feminine. Something with — what do you call it? — more character about it. When I finally take her to bed (and I am in no hurry, no hurry at all) I will get some better idea of her true colour, get under her skin as it were.

Did you get the pun?

I have found her, on numerous occasions, playing Monopoly in the middle of her room, drinking Guinness, surrounded by white dolls.

Several times a week she comes to wash my dishes and to be persuaded to share a meal with me. The consumption of food is, for the moment, our most rewarding mutual occupation. We discuss, sometimes, the experience of the flavours. We talk about the fish fingers or the steak and kidney pies from Marks & Sparks. She is still shy, and needs to be coaxed. She has revealed to me a love for oysters which I find exciting. Each week I put a little of my pension aside. When I have enough I will buy oysters and we will discuss them in detail. I often think of this meal.

At an earlier stage I did not understand myself so well, and achieved, on one or two occasions, a quiet drunken kiss. But I have not pursued the matter, being content, for the moment, with the meals and the company on these quiet nights now that the television has been taken away and now that I, unemployed, have so little money to spend with the ladies in Bayswater, the cinema, or even a pint of best bitter in the Bricklayers Arms which, to tell the truth, I always found dull.

I am in no hurry. There is no urgency in the matter. Sooner or later we shall discuss the oysters. Then it will be time to move on to other more intimate things, moving layer after layer, until I discover her true colours, her flavours, her smells. The prospect of so slow an
exploration excites me and I am in no hurry, no hurry at all. May it last for ever.

Let me describe my darling. Shall I call her that? An adventure I had planned to keep, but now it is said. Let me describe her to you. My darling has a long pale face with long golden hair, slightly frizzy, the kind with odd waving pieces that catch the light and look pretty. Her nose is long, downwards, not outwards, making her appear more sorrowful than she might be. Her breasts, I would guess, are large and heavy, but she wears so many sweaters (for want of a better term) that it is hard to tell; likewise the subtleties of her figure. But she moves, my darling, with the grace of a cat, pacing about her room surrounded by her white dolls and her Monopoly money.

She seems to have no job and I have never asked her about her occupation. That is still to come, many episodes later. I shall record it if and when it is revealed. For the moment: she keeps no regular hours, none that I can equate with anything. But I, for that matter, keep no regular hours either and, never having owned a clock, have been timeless since the battery in the transistor radio gave out. Normally it seems to be late afternoon.

She is making up her mind. I can hear her at the top of the stairs. Twice, in the last few minutes, she has come out onto the landing and then retreated back into her room. She has walked around her room. She has stood by the window. Now she moves towards the landing once more. She is there. There is a silence. Perhaps she is arranging dolls on the landing.

No. She is, I think, I am almost positive, descending the stairs, on tiptoe. She plans to surprise me.

A tap at the door. My stomach rumbles.

I move quickly to the door and open it. She says hello, and smiles in a tired way.

She says, phew. (She is referring to the smell of the bad milk in the unwashed bottles.)

I apologize, smooth down my bed, pull up the cover, and offer her a place to sit. She accepts, throwing my pyjama pants under the bed for the sake of tidiness.

She says, how is your situation?

I relate the state of the employment market. But she, I notice, is a little fidgety. She plays with the corner of the sheet. She is distracted,
appears to be impatient. I continue with my report but know she is not fully listening.

She leaves the bed and begins to wash up, heating the water on the small gas heater. I ask her of her situation but she remains silent.

The water is not yet hot enough but she pours it into the tub and begins to wash up, moving slowly and quickly at the same time. I dry. I ask her of her situation.

She discusses George, who I am unsure of. He was possibly her husband. It appears there was a child. The child she visits every third Sunday. For the hundredth time I remark on how unreasonable this is. The conversation tells neither of us anything, but then that is not its purpose. The dishes she dispenses with quickly, an untidy washer, I could do better myself — she leaves large portions of food behind on plates, bottles, and cutlery, but I do not complain — I keep the dishes to attract her, like honey.

I relate a slightly risqué joke, a joke so old it is new to her. She laughs beautifully, her head thrown back, her long white throat like the throat of a white doll, but soft, like the inside of a thigh. Her throat is remarkable, her voice coming softly from it, timorously, pianissimo.

She is, how to call it, artistic. She wears the clothes of an ordinary person, of a great number of quite different ordinary persons, but she arranges them in the manner of those who are called artistic. Small pieces of things are tacked together with a confidence that contradicts her manner and amazes me. Pieces of tiny artificial flowers, a part of a butcher’s apron, old Portuguese boots, a silver pendant, medal ribbons, a hand-painted stole, and a hundred milk bottle tops made unrecognizable. She is like a magpie with a movable nest.

Her name, which I had earlier decided not to reveal, is Nile. It is too private a name to reveal. But it is so much a part of her that I feel loath to change it for fear I will leave something important out. Not to mention it would be like forgetting to mention the white dolls.

The washing-up is finished and it is too early yet to prepare a meal. It is a pleasant time, a time of expectation. It needs, like all things, the greatest control. But I am an expert in these matters, a man who can make a lump of barley sugar last all day.

We sit side by side on the bed and read the papers. I take the employment section and she, as usual, the deaths, births, and
marriages. As usual she reads them all, her pale nail-bitten finger moving slowly over the columns of type, her lips moving silently as she reads the names.

She says, half to herself, they never put them in.

I am at once eager and reluctant to pick up this thread. I am not sure if it is a loose thread or one that might, so to speak, unravel the whole sweater. I wait, no longer seeing the words I am looking at. My eardrums are so finely stretched that I fear they may burst.