Written on the Body (5 page)

I cut a slice of fruit bread. If in doubt eat. I can understand why for some people the best social worker is the fridge. My usual confessional is a straight Macallan but not before 5 o’clock. Perhaps that’s why I try and have my crises in the evening. Well, here I am at half past four with fruit bread and a cup of tea and instead of taking hold of myself I can only think of taking hold of Louise. It’s the food that’s doing it. There could not be a more unromantic moment than this and yet the yeasty smell of raisins and rye is exciting me more than any
Playboy
banana. It’s only a matter of time. Is it nobler to struggle
for a week before flying out the door or should I go and get my toothbrush now? I am drowning in inevitability.

I phoned a friend whose advice was to play the sailor and run a wife in every port. If I told Jacqueline I’d ruin everything and for what? If I told Jacqueline I’d hurt her beyond healing and did I have that right? Probably I had nothing more than dog-fever for two weeks and I could get it out of my system and come home to my kennel.

Good sense. Common sense. Good dog.

What does it say in the tea-leaves? Nothing but a capital L.

When Jacqueline came home I kissed her and said, ‘I wish you didn’t smell of the Zoo.’

She looked surprised. ‘I can’t help it. Zoos are smelly places.’

She went immediately to run a bath. I gave her a drink thinking how I disliked her clothes and the way she switched on the radio as soon as she got in.

Grimly I began to prepare our dinner. What would we do this evening? I felt like a bandit who hides a gun in his mouth. If I spoke I would reveal everything. Better not to speak. Eat, smile, make space for Jacqueline. Surely that was right?

The phone rang. I skidded to get it, closing the bedroom door behind me.

It was Louise.

‘Come over tomorrow,’ she said. ‘There’s something I want to tell you.’

‘Louise, if it’s to do with today, I can’t … you see, I’ve decided I can’t. That is I couldn’t because, well what if, you know …’

The phone clicked and went dead. I stared at it the way Lauren Bacall does in those films with Humphrey Bogart. What I need now is a car with a running board and a pair of fog lights. I could be with you in ten minutes Louise. The trouble is that all I’ve got is a Mini belonging to my girlfriend.

We were eating our spaghetti. I thought, As long as I don’t say her name I’ll be all right. I started a game with myself, counting out on the cynical clock face the extent of my success. What am I? I feel like a kid in the examination room faced with a paper I can’t complete. Let the clock go faster. Let me get out of here. At 9 o’clock I told Jacqueline I was exhausted. She reached over and took my hand. I felt nothing. And then there we were in our pyjamas side by side and my lips were sealed and my cheeks must have been swelling out like a gerbil’s because my mouth was full of Louise.

I don’t have to tell you where I went the next day.

During the night I had a lurid dream about an ex-girlfriend of mine who had been heavily into papier-maché. It had started as a hobby; and who shall object to a few buckets of flour and water and a roll of chicken wire? I’m a liberal and I believe in free expression. I went to her house one day and poking out of the letter-box just at crotch level was the head of a yellow and green serpent. Not a real one but livid enough with a red tongue and silver foil teeth. I hesitated to ring the bell. Hesitated because to reach the bell meant pushing my private parts right into the head of the snake. I held a little dialogue with myself.

The door flew open and Amy stood on the mat. She was wearing a kaftan and a long string of beads. ‘It won’t hurt you,’ she said. ‘It’s for the postman. He’s been bothering me.’

‘I don’t think it’s going to frighten him,’ I said. ‘It’s only a toy snake. It didn’t frighten me.’

‘You’ve nothing to be frightened of,’ she said. ‘It’s got a rat-trap in the jaw.’ She disappeared inside while I stood hovering on the step holding my bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau. She returned with a leek and shoved it in the snake’s mouth. There was a terrible clatter and the bottom half of the leek fell limply on to the mat. ‘Bring it in with you will you?’ she said. ‘We’re eating it later.’

I awoke sweating and chilled. Jacqueline slept peacefully beside me, the light was leaking through the old curtains. Muffled in my dressing gown I went into the garden, glad of the wetness sudden beneath my feet. The air was clean with a hint of warmth and the sky had pink clawmarks pulled through it. There was an urban pleasure in knowing that I was the only one breathing the air. The relentless in-out-in-out of millions of lungs depresses me. There are too many of us on this planet and it’s beginning to show. My neighbour’s blinds were down. What were
their dreams and nightmares? How different it would be to see them now, slack in the jaw, bodies open. We might be able to say something truthful to one another instead of the usual rolled-up Goodmornings.

I went to look at my sunflowers, growing steadily, sure that the sun would be there for them, fulfilling themselves in the proper way at the proper time. Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and mostly without fail. We don’t know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo sapiens. Who’s kidding whom?

So what am I going to do? I asked Robin on the wall. Robins are very faithful creatures who mate with the same mate year by year. I love the brave red shield on their breast and the determined way they follow the spade in search of worms. There am I doing all the digging and there’s little Robin making off with the worm. Homo sapiens. Blind Nature.

I don’t feel wise. Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?

The facts of my case are not unusual:

The church could tell me, my friends have tried to help me, I could take the stoic course and run from temptation or I could put up sail and tack into this gathering wind.

For the first time in my life, I want to do the right
thing more than I want to get my own way. I suppose I owe that to Bathsheba …

I remember her visiting my house soon after she had returned from a six-week trip to South Africa. Before she had gone, I had given her an ultimatum: Him or me. Her eyes, which very often filled with tears of self-pity, had reproached me for yet another lover’s half-nelson. I forced her to it and of course she made the decision for him. All right. Six weeks. I felt like the girl in the story of Rumpelstiltskin who is given a cellar full of straw to weave into gold by the following morning. All I had ever got from Bathsheba were bales of straw but when she was with me I believed that they were promises carved in precious stone. So I had to face up to the waste and the mess and I worked hard to sweep the chaff away. Then she came in, unrepentant, her memory gone as ever, wondering why I hadn’t returned her trunk calls or written poste restante.

‘I meant what I said.’

She sat in silence for about fifteen minutes while I glued the legs back on a kitchen chair. Then she asked me if I was seeing anybody else. I said I was, briefly, vaguely, hopefully.

She nodded and turned to go. When she got to the door she said, ‘I intended to tell you before we left but I forgot.’

I looked at her, sudden and sharp. I hated that ‘we’.

‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘Uriah got NSU from a woman he slept with in New York. He slept with her to punish me of course. But he didn’t tell me and the doctor thinks I have it too. I’ve been taking the antibiotics so it’s probably all right. That is, you’re probably all right. You ought to check though.’

I came at her with the leg of the chair. I wanted to run it straight across her perfectly made-up face.

‘You shit.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘You told me you weren’t having sex with him any more.’

‘I thought it was unfair. I didn’t want to shatter what little sexual confidence he might have left.’

‘I suppose that’s why you’ve never bothered to tell him that he doesn’t know how to make you come.’

She didn’t answer. She was crying now. It was like blood in the water to me. I circled her.

‘How long is it you’ve been married? The perfect public marriage. Ten years, twelve? And you don’t ask him to put his head between your legs because you think he’ll find it distasteful. Let’s hear it for sexual confidence.’

‘Stop it,’ she said, pushing me away. ‘I have to go home.’

‘It must be seven o’clock. That’s your home-time isn’t it? That’s why you used to leave the practice early so that you could get a quick fuck for an hour and a half and then smooth yourself down to say, “Hello darling,” and cook dinner.’

‘You let me come,’ she said.

‘Yes, I did, when you were bleeding, when you were sick, again and again I made you come.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I meant we did it together. You wanted me there.’

‘I wanted you everywhere and the pathetic thing is I still do.’

She looked at me. ‘Drive me home will you?’

I still remember that night with shame and rage. I didn’t
drive her home. I walked with her through the dark lanes to her house hearing the swish of her trenchcoat and the rub of her briefcase against her calf. Like Dirk Bogarde she prided herself on her profile and it was lit to suitable effect under the dull streetlights. I left her where I knew she’d be safe and listened to the click of her heels dying away. After a few seconds they stopped. I was familiar with this; she was checking her hair and her face, dusting me from coat and loins. The gate squeaked and closed metal on metal. They were inside now, four-square, everything shared, even the disease.

As I walked home, breathing deeply, knowing that I was shaking and not knowing how to stop it, I thought, I’m as guilty as her. Hadn’t I let it happen, colluded with the deceit and let all my pride be burnt away? I was nothing, a weak piece of shit, I deserved Bathsheba. Self-respect. They’re supposed to teach you that in the Army. Perhaps I should enlist. Would it recommend me though, to write Broken Heart under Personal Interests?

At the Clap Clinic the following day, I looked at my fellow sufferers. Shifty Jack-the-lads, fat businessmen in suits cut to hide the bulge. A few women, tarts yes, and other women too. Women with eyes full of pain and fear. What was this place and why had nobody told them? ‘Who gave it to you love?’ I wanted to say to one middle-aged woman in a floral print. She kept staring at the posters about gonorrhoea and then trying to concentrate on her copy of
Country Life
. ‘Divorce him,’ I wanted to say. ‘You think this is the first time?’ Her name was called and she disappeared into a bleak white room. This place is like the ante-chamber to Judgement Day. A pot of stale Cona coffee, a few scruffy leatherette benches, plastic flowers in a plastic vase and all over the walls, top to bottom,
posters for every genital wart and discoloured emission. It’s impressive what a few inches of flesh can catch.

Ah, Bathsheba, it’s not the same as your elegant surgery is it? There your private patients can have their teeth removed to Vivaldi and enjoy twenty minutes’ rest on a reclining sofa. Your flowers are delivered fresh every day and you serve only the most aromatic herbal teas. Against your white coat, their heads on your breast, no-one fears the needle and syringe. I came to you for a crown and you offered me a kingdom. Unfortunately I could only take possession between five and seven, weekdays, and the odd weekend when he was away playing football.

My name was called.

‘Have I got it?’

The nurse looked at me the way you do a flat tyre and said, ‘No.’

Then she started filling out a form and told me to come back in three months.

‘What for?’

‘Sexually transmitted diseases are not normally an isolated problem. If your habits are such that you have caught it once it’s likely that you will catch it again.’ She paused. ‘We are creatures of habit.’

‘I haven’t caught it, any of it.’

She opened the door. ‘Three months will be sufficient.’

Sufficient for what? I walked down the corridor past
SURGERY
and
MOTHER AND BABY
and
OUTPATIENTS THIS WAY
. It’s a feature of the Clap Clinic that it’s situated well out of the way of proper deserving patients. Its labyrinthian cunning means that the user will have to ask at least five times how to get there. Although I lowered my voice, particularly in deference to
MOTHER AND BABY
, I was returned no such courtesy. ‘Venereal Disease? Down the
end turn right turn left straight on through the gates past the lift up the stairs down the corridor round the corner, through the swing doors and there you are,’ yelled the male nurse, carefully stopping his trolley-load of dirty sheets on my foot … ‘You did say VENEREAL?’

Yes I did, and I said it again to the junior doctor rakishly swinging his stethoscope at the
OUTPATIENTS
. ‘Clap Clinic? No problem, you’re not more than five minutes away by wheelchair.’ He pealed with laughter like a posse of ice-cream vans and pointed in the direction of the incinerator chute. ‘That’s the quickest way. Good luck.’