The PowerBook (5 page)

‘This afternoon.’

‘We should have gone to bed then.’

‘We hardly spoke six sentences to each other.’

‘That’s the best way. Before the complications start.’

‘Don’t worry. No start. No complications.’

‘Are you always such a moralist?’

‘You make me sound like a Jehovah’s Witness.’

‘You can doorstep me any night.’

‘Will you stop it?’

‘As you say, we haven’t started yet.’

‘After supper we go back to the hotel and say goodnight.’

‘And tomorrow you will catch the Eurostar to London.’

‘And the day after you’ll fly Air France to New York.’

‘You must be a Jehovah’s Witness.’

‘Why must I?’

‘You’re not married but you won’t sleep with me.’

‘You are married.’

‘That’s my problem.’

‘True …’

‘Well then …’

‘I’ve done it before and it became my problem.’

‘What happened?’

‘I fell in love.’

It was a long time ago. It feels like another life until I remember it was my life, like a letter you turn up in your own handwriting, hardly believing what it says.

I loved a woman who was married. She loved me too, and if there had been less love or less marriage I might have escaped. Perhaps no one really does escape.

She wanted me because I was a pool where she drank. I wanted her because she was a lover and
a mother all mixed up into one. I wanted her because she was as beautiful as a warm afternoon with the sun on the rocks.

The damage done was colossal.

‘You lost her?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘Have you got over it?’

‘It was a love affair not an assault course.’

‘Love is an assault course.’

‘Some wounds never heal.’

‘I’m sorry.’

She held out her hand. What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I’m talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the
Titanic
you go down. That’s the size of it, the immensity of it. It’s not proper, it’s not clean, it’s not containable.

She held out her hand. ‘You’re still angry.’

‘I’m still alive.’

What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.

‘But pain is pointless.’

‘Not always.’

‘Then what is the use of suffering? Can you tell me that?’

She thinks I’m holding on to pain. She thinks the pain is a souvenir. Perhaps she thinks that pain is the only way I can feel. As it is, the pain reminds me that my feelings are damaged. The pain doesn’t stop me loving—only a false healing could do that—the pain tells me that neither my receptors nor my transmitters are in perfect working order. The pain is not feeling, but it has become an instrument of feeling.

She said, ‘Do you still like having sex?’

‘You talk as though I’ve had an amputation.’

‘I think you have. I think someone has cut out your heart.’

I looked at her and my eyes were clear.

‘That’s not how the story ends.’

Stop.

There is always the danger of automatic writing. The danger of writing yourself towards an ending that need never be told. At a certain point the story gathers momentum. It convinces itself, and does its best to convince you, that the end in sight is the only possible outcome. There is a fatefulness and a loss of control that are somehow comforting. This was your script, but now it writes itself.

Stop.

Break the narrative. Refuse all the stories that have been told so far (because that is what the momentum really is), and try to tell the story
differently—in a different style, with different weights—and allow some air to those elements choked with centuries of use, and give some substance to the floating world.

In quantum reality there are millions of possible worlds, unactualised, potential, perhaps bearing in on us, but only reachable by worm-holes we can never find. If we do find one, we don’t come back.

In those other worlds events may track our own, but the ending will be different. Sometimes we need a different ending.

I can’t take my body through space and time, but I can send my mind, and use the stories, written and unwritten, to tumble me out in a place not yet existing—my future.

The stories are maps. Maps of journeys that have been made and might have been made. A Marco Polo route through territory real and imagined.

Some of the territory has become as familiar as a seaside resort. When we go there we know we will build sandcastles and get sunburnt and that the café menu never changes.

Some of the territory is wilder and reports do not tally. The guides are only good for so much. In these wild places I become part of the map, part of the story, adding my version to the versions there. This Talmudic layering of story on story, map on map, multiplies possibilities but also warns me of the weight of accumulation. I live in one world—material, seeming-solid—and the weight of that is quite enough. The other worlds I can reach need to keep their lightness and their speed of light. What I carry back from those worlds to my world is another chance.

She put out her hand. ‘I want to rescue you.’

‘From what?’

‘From the past. From pain.’

‘The past is only a way of talking.’

‘Then from pain.’

‘I don’t want a wipe-clean life.’

‘Don’t be so prickly.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘What do you want? Tell me.’

‘No compromises.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘Only the impossible is worth the effort.’

‘Are you a fanatic or an idealist?’

‘Why do you need to label me?’

‘I need to understand.’

‘No, you want to explain me to yourself. You’re not sure, so you need a label. But I’m not a piece of furniture with the price on the back.’

‘This is a heavy way to get some sex.’

The waitress cleared the plates and brought us some brown and yellow banded ice cream, the same colour as the ceilings and walls. It even had the varnishy look of the 1930s. The cherries round the edges were like Garbo kisses. You speared one and fed it to me.

‘Come to bed with me.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes now. It’s all I can offer. It’s all I can ask.’

‘No difficulties, no complications?’

‘None.’

‘Except that someone will be waiting for you in Room 29.’

‘He’ll be drunk and fast asleep.’

‘And someone will be waiting for me.’

‘Someone special?’

‘Just a friend.’

‘Well then …’

‘Good manners?’

‘I’ll leave a message at the night desk.’

She got up and fiddled with some change for the phone.

‘Wait …’

She didn’t answer. There she was, at the phone, her face turned away from me.

We went to a small hotel that used to be a spa.

The bathrooms still have steam vents and needle showers, and if you turn the wrong knob while you’re cleaning your teeth the whole bedroom will fill up with steam like the set of a Hitchcock movie. From somewhere out of the steam the phone will ring. There will be a footstep on the landing, voices. Meanwhile you’ll be stumbling for the window, naked, blinded, with only a toothbrush between yourself and Paris.

The room we took at the Hotel Tonic was on the top floor. It had three beds with candlewick
counterpanes and a view over the rooftops of the street. Opposite us, cut into the frame of the window, was a boy dancing alone to a Tina Turner record. We leaned out against the metal safety bars, watching him, watching the cars pull away. You put your hand on the small of my back under my shirt.

This is how we made love.

You kissed my throat.

The boy was dancing.

You kissed my collarbone.

Two taxi drivers were arguing in the street.

You put your tongue into the channel of my breasts.

A door slammed underneath us.

I opened your legs onto my hip.

Two pigeons were asleep under the red wings of the roof.

You began to move with me—hands, tongue, body.

Game-show laughter from the television next door.

You took my breasts in both hands and I slid you out of your jeans.

Rattle of bottles on a tray.

You don’t wear knickers.

A door opened. The tray was set down.

You keep your breasts in a black mesh cage.

Car headlights reflected in the dressing-table mirror.

Lie down with me.

Get on top of me.

Ease yourself, just there, just there …

Harry speaks French, he’ll pick up the beer.

Push.

Stella or Bud?

Harder.

Do you want nuts?

Make me come. Make me.

Ring her after midnight your time, she said.

Just fuck me.

Got the number?

Fuck me.

The next morning I woke late and turned over to kiss her.

She had gone. The sheet was still warm but she had gone. I lay there, my growing agitation of mind beginning to fight with the gentle heaviness of my body. I had no idea what to do, so I did the obvious—got dressed and ran round the corner to our other hotel.

At the Relais de Louvre my own room was empty. Not surprising. There were my clothes and travel bag, and one ticket home. Well, I had given up any right to company.

I went down the corridor to Room 29. The door was open. The maid was cleaning up.

‘
Où est la Mademoiselle?
’

The maid shrugged and switched on her Hoover. Paris is full of mademoiselles.

I rang the front desk.

Rien.

Room 29 had checked out and there was no forwarding address.

I walked to a little café on the river and ordered some coffee and croissants. No difficulties. No complications. Not even goodbye. So that’s the end of it then.

I felt as if I had blundered into someone else’s
life by chance, discovered I wanted to stay, then blundered back into my own, without a clue, a hint, or a way of finishing the story.

Who was I last night? Who was she?

Night.

I logged on to the Net. There were no e-mails for me. You had run out on the story. Run out on me. Vanished.

I typed in your address.

Nothing.

I set one of the search engines to find you.

Nothing.

Here I am like a penitent in a confessional. I want to tell you how I feel, but there’s nobody on the other side of the screen.

What did I expect?

This is a virtual world. This is a world inventing itself. Daily, new landmasses form and then submerge. New continents of thought break off from the mainland. Some benefit from a trade wind, some sink without trace. Others are like Atlantis—fabulous, talked about, but never found.

Found objects wash up on the shores of my computer. Tin cans and old tyres mix with the pirate’s stuff. The buried treasure is really there, but caulked and outlandish. Hard to spot because
unfamiliar, and few of us can see what has never been named.

I’m looking for something, it’s true.

I’m looking for the meaning inside the data.

That’s why I trawl my screen like a beach-comber—looking for you, looking for me, trying to see through the disguise. I guess I’ve been looking for us both all my life.

It began with a promise:

‘While I am living I shall rescue you.’

That dark night I took a ladder and propped it against the window where I knew you slept. You would not be sleeping.

The window was barred with iron, and you were like an anchorite behind your grille, and I was more like a penitent than a knight, as I whispered to you and touched your fingers. You said you would rather have me with you that night than see the sun rise on another day.