Genie and Paul (9 page)

What Genie remembered of that night in the club was this: she remembered settling back into a low-slung sofa feeling as if she were in an airport lounge. She felt prematurely exhausted, as though waiting for a long-haul flight home. Genie was more fed up for its having been her suggestion. She’d asked Paul what he wanted to do for his birthday and he’d suggested they go clubbing. If we’re doing that, she’d said, I’m taking a pill with you. He’d been reluctant at first, but she had insisted. They might reconnect, she’d thought. She knew these things were supposed to open you up.

But here she was, feeling very much closed down.

Paul said they were old-school ones, warm, zingy, true – whatever ‘true’ meant – and like the anxious believer she was Genie had swallowed it whole. Now here she sat with her mouth closed over her teeth because her teeth looked green, she was sure of it. His were – they were flashing as he gnashed on a tired piece of gum, grinning indiscriminately. She told herself it was just the light but it was an insidious kind of light that seemed to have no source. Genie stared up at the ceiling, trying to find it. Paul nudged her, sliding an arm along her shoulder.

You alright?

Yeah, fine.

Then, feeling suddenly queasy, she shook him off. I’m just going to the loo.

She turned at the doorway and caught his eye, watching his face struggle to form an expression of concern.

The toilets were full of sweaty, swooning girls, limp as week-old lilies with the heat and drugs. Even the mirrors were sweating.

A large Nigerian woman was fanning herself with a battered copy of
OK!
magazine, dealing imperiously with the girls who came to scrutinise the table of treasures over which she presided: half-empty perfume bottles, lipsticks, brushes, lollipops – all laid out like artefacts from a dig. Genie dropped some coins in the dish and took a red lipstick misshapen by a hundred mouths, trying it on in front of the mirror. It drove like a wonky dodgem and veered across her face. She rubbed the mark away with a piece of tissue and inspected the damage. It looked as if she’d been slapped. Rubbing made it worse. She gave up, put the lipstick back and looked through the perfume. She picked a bottle at random and sprayed. The smell overwhelmed her and she ran to a sink and threw herself over it. The vomit came out in a satisfyingly clean motion, she thought, like film run backwards.

She rested her forehead against the mirror; it had the cold, invasive touch of a speculum. Her face was pale, but jammy around the mouth with lipstick. What a mess, she thought.

A girl filling a bottle with water at the sink beside her asked if she was alright. Genie explained that she had never taken one of these things before. The girl, who on closer inspection was actually a lot older than Genie first supposed, went soft-eyed.

Lucky you. Your first time. What did you take?

A pill.

I know that. I mean what kind?

A speckled one.

Never mind. Your first time, eh? Mine were doves.

Genie was pleased with the image: a speckled dove. The girl herself was soft and smoky-looking, plump-breasted like a wood pigeon.

Have you been sick, love? Do you feel OK now?

Genie nodded and closed her eyes tight as though inhaling deeply.

Ah, cooed the pigeon, that’ll be the smack in it.

Genie thought in a detached way that the pill must have started to work: the idea that she had ingested smack was not as alarming as it should have been. And she was proved right when she finally left the toilets and a wave of clubbers broke around her and she was carried along the corridor and down the stairs, moving without resistance through the crowd, flowing down the stairs and to the basement dance floor, where she found Paul. He was dancing.

Genie tugged at his sleeve and he opened his eyes.

Genie! He grinned down at her, ruffling her hair.

Coming up is an elegant way to describe it, Genie thought, the nausea quite gone now and her blood turning to something like honey as she locked onto the bass line, tripping up on the sneaky breakbeats, feeling for the spaces in between. It’s like skipping with two ropes, she thought, the way she used to do at school. She tugged at Paul’s shirt, wanting to tell him she felt great, but the words burst like bubbles in her mouth and Paul had his eyes closed, lost in it.

After a while, almost telepathically, they both edged towards the side of the dance floor, to some sofas in the corner. Genie quite liked the idea of a cigarette. She asked Paul for one and he offered her his crushed packet.

It’s your last one.

We can share it, he said.

He lit up and passed it to her. She took a drag, the ashiness in her mouth almost savoury. Once, when she’d been trying to give up, she had switched from Silk Cut to Marlboro Reds. Instead of being repulsed for life as planned, she had simply got used to the stronger taste. A residue of the repulsion factor remained and, if she thought about it,
had probably become part of the pleasure of smoking for her now. But now the ashiness turned to cinders which left a burning in her throat. She passed Paul the remainder of the cigarette and swallowed some water from a small bottle in her bag.

Feeling better? he asked.

Yeah. I was sick. But I’m OK now. It wasn’t really like being sick. It felt quite nice actually.

The word she thought of was ‘rinse’. It had felt as fresh and cleansing as rinsing her hair. The word ‘rinse’ led Genie to register a vague thirstiness she realised had been building up in her before she’d even lit that cigarette. She downed the rest of the water.

Paul sighed contentendly and emitted a lazy smoke ring. He squeezed her arm; Paul, who had been so silent and moody lately. Now all that bad feeling had melted away. It felt right to talk to him.

You’ve seemed really distant lately –

But Paul was staring at something behind her.

Two ice sculptures sat on the bar, a male and female torso. The club was launching its own brand of water and the bar staff were pouring bottles of it into the apparently hollow sculptures as clubbers queued to drink through the genitals. He was watching a girl with long red hair going down on the ice cock, giving it plenty of tongue.

I thought that was Eloise.

He shook his head, as though trying to rid himself of the image.

Sort of thing she’d do.

They both laughed.

Just let me know if I’m cramping your style at any point, she said. You’re a single man, remember.

What’s the matter? Don’t you like hanging out with your big brother?

It wasn’t like Paul to be so sociable on pills. Not since the early days, anyway. She’d gone along with him to a couple of squat parties in recent years and after leaving him to go and dance would often return to find him sitting alone in the corner. He seemed to like the experience of overloading himself and just sitting on his own, breathing. Absorbing himself in the pleasure of breathing in and out. If you thought too hard about breathing you might forget how to do it at all, like saying a word over and over again until it lost its meaning. But this was like her fifteenth birthday all over again. How
he
had been that night. The warmth, the lightness. Taking this pill was like opening up a time capsule.
Swallowing
a time capsule. She’d taken it because she wanted to talk to Paul, to feel close to him, to have him open up to her. She remembered a film they had watched together once: about a man’s search for his girlfriend who’d disappeared suddenly when they’d stopped at a garage for petrol. After years of searching, her abductor contacted him and agreed to meet up. On meeting, the abductor said, If you want to know what happened to your girlfriend, take this. He held out a pill, which the boyfriend took. When he came to, he found himself in a coffin.

Her thirst was more persistent than she’d supposed, Genie realised, feeling now as though she had a mouthful of sawdust. As if she were that character in the film and had maybe tried to chew her way out through the coffin. She reached for Paul’s water bottle, and emptied it in three swallows. It had obviously been refilled several times, and was creased with tiny white scars where the plastic had been stressed. Handing it back to him, Genie realised that her hand was damp – that the bottle was starting to leak. Or had she broken out in a sweat without realising it? Her throat seemed drier than ever.

Genie?

She realised, as she caught him sneaking glances at her, that she probably looked uneasy. How long had she been drifting off like that? He was trying not to look concerned, she could see that, she could see he didn’t want to trigger anxiety in her but he’d seen her looking upset. Walking past the school chapel at night with Eloise had been like that too, past the two candles lit in perpetual vigil by the chapel doors, their flames rocking in a draught that threatened to blow them out, heralding the presence of the devil, flames that threw huge shadows which licked the walls and followed them along the corridor, Genie and Eloise not daring to look one another in the eye because of the fear that would spark up between them.

Genie wanted to get away so that Paul wouldn’t mirror and distort her mood into paranoia as he seemed to be doing now. Suddenly she felt sick again. She had drunk too much water too quickly. And yet her thirst, if anything, had intensified.

I’m just going to be sick now.

She said this in completely the wrong tone, it sounded to her – too bright or too casual, like
I’m just going to buy some more cigarettes
, but then she thought wildly, What would be the right way to say it? She couldn’t remember how she would normally say it.

Shall I come with you?

Oh, no – no – I’ll be fine.

I’ll just see you back here, then.

She couldn’t get away fast enough, pushing her way through the dancers, who didn’t melt aside this time but stood solid as pillars, blocking her way as she stumbled past the ice torsos on the bar, the ice cock sucked to a stump, leaking sadly.

The pigeon girl was still there, standing sentry beside the sinks, a bottle held under the tap; she was reassuring
a freaked-out teenager with eyes like glitterballs. Genie watched her jaws working mechanically like an insect’s.

Don’t worry, love, just stay with me, here have some of this water. This is your first one, isn’t it, love? Don’t worry, you just have some of this water. It’s coming on strong now but when it calms down you’ll have the time of your fucking life, love. Just go with it. Go with it…

She didn’t seem to recognise Genie.

Genie ran to a sink and stuck her mouth to the tap, drinking in prolonged swallows. And now the nausea was quite violent, each gag washing her mouth full of thin, bitter bile that burnt her throat and dried it out. It was getting harder and harder to hold back.

In the cubicle, she sat on the floor, cradling the toilet bowl. She wished Paul were there to hold her hair back.

She didn’t know how long afterwards it was that she left the toilets, but when she managed to find the place where she’d been with Paul, not daring to look into the faces of all these sweat-dripping freaks with eyes that wouldn’t blink, staring at her as she pushed past, he had gone.

That was the last thing she remembered.

It took Genie several minutes to realise where she was. The curtains were open, the bed made, the room iced over with moonlight. Paul’s room. Dimly she became aware that she had been sleepwalking. She collapsed onto Paul’s bed, pulled back the covers and crawled in. The sheets still smelt of him.

She awoke before Mam. In the kitchen, she made coffee and opened the dresser drawer where she found a packet of Paul’s cigarettes and a lighter. Genie went onto the balcony. Out here all you saw was a grid of other balconies, each filled with their individual combinations of washing and plants, toys and junk. But if you looked up you saw a stretch of skyline that took in Canary Wharf, St Paul’s Cathedral, the BT Tower and, if it was clear like today, the skeletal O of the London Eye. She took a cigarette from the packet and lit it. After a couple of puffs she stubbed it out in the dry earth of one of the potted geraniums Mam had put out there, hoping to create a Parisian-style balcony. But the plants were dusty and stunted: the place was permanently covered in a fine grey soot, a kind of light ash that might have been sucked up from some volcano on another island and scattered in the wind to fall here, in Hackney. Pigeons nibbled through the netting which Mam had hung up to keep them out and, finding nothing of interest to them, expressed disgust by shitting all over the place like vandals or occupying soldiers. Mam had given up on the balcony now and tried instead to cultivate plants indoors: fake-looking things with waxy leaves; their soil spiked with plastic care-instructions like medical charts
at the end of a hospital bed.
Water sparingly
.
Needs constant attention
.

Mam knocked on the balcony door. She was holding up a letter. It’s just come, Mam said. Mauritius.

Genie thought back to the letter Paul had sent half a lifetime ago. The address on this envelope was also handwritten, but the handwriting was unfamiliar. Along with a short letter written on thin, lined paper was a page from a book. It was a plate from
Paul et Virginie
. Genie recognised the image. The letter, which gave an address in La Gaulette, was from Gaetan, a friend Paul had mentioned before.

Virginie on the prow of a ship, her eyes looking to Heaven, her hands clasped in prayer, her long fair hair whipped around her by a violent wind. The ship caught on a reef; a tempest raging. Paul, on the shore – stripped to the waist, his face contorted in agony, unable to reach her, restrained by two men on either side of him, one old and white, one black and middle-aged, both struggling to hold him back from the waves.

Mam did not like the idea at first.

Why should you go maxing out your credit cards chasing him halfway around the world? He left you on your own that night, Genie.

Because he is my brother and I love him more than he loves himself.

Genie told Mam all that she had learnt about Paul those past three weeks. Mam went quiet. Then she agreed that it would not be impossible for Genie to find him. Rodrigues was tiny, after all. But after the cyclone it might well be chaos there. And it was not possible to go directly from London. You could only reach it via Mauritius. Genie would have to fly there first.

Come with me, Genie said. Time you went back. We could make it a bit of a holiday. We could go and visit Grandmère.

She doesn’t even know who I am, said Mam.

No, but you know who she is.

I won’t go. Someone once said that to love your country you must leave it, and I did. But I will hate it if I go back. In a strange way I can understand why Paul would want to. He seems to have some unfinished business there. But I don’t know why he’s gone running off to
Rodrigues
.

Troubled souls seek the wilderness, said Genie.