Written on the Body (6 page)

Maybe it’s my face. Maybe I look like a doormat today. I feel like one.

On the way out I bought myself a large bunch of flowers.

‘Visiting someone?’ said the girl, her voice going up at the corners like a hospital sandwich. She was bored to death, having to be nice, jammed behind the ferns, her right hand dripping with green water.

‘Yes, myself. I want to find out how I am.’

She raised her eyebrows and squeaked, ‘You all right?’

‘I shall be,’ I said, throwing her a carnation.

At home, I put the flowers in a vase, changed the sheets and got into bed. ‘What did Bathsheba ever give me but a perfect set of teeth?’

‘All the better to eat you with,’ said the Wolf.

I got a can of spray paint and wrote
SELF
-
RESPECT
over the door.

Let Cupid try and get past that one.

Louise was eating breakfast when I arrived. She was wearing a red and green guardsman stripe dressing gown
gloriously too large. Her hair was down, warming her neck and shoulders, falling forward on to the table-cloth in wires of light. There was a dangerously electrical quality about Louise. I worried that the steady flame she offered might be fed by a current far more volatile. Superficially she seemed serene, but beneath her control was a crackling power of the kind that makes me nervous when I pass pylons. She was more of a Victorian heroine than a modern woman. A heroine from a Gothic novel, mistress of her house, yet capable of setting fire to it and fleeing in the night with one bag. I always expected her to wear her keys at her waist. She was compressed, stoked down, a volcano dormant but not dead. It did occur to me that if Louise were a volcano then I might be Pompeii.

I didn’t go in straight away, I stood lurking outside with my collar turned up, hiding to get a better view. I thought, If she calls the police, it’s only what I deserve. But she wouldn’t call the police, she’d take her pearl-handled revolver from the glass decanter and shoot me through the heart. At the post-mortem they’ll find an enlarged heart and no guts.

The white table-cloth, the brown teapot. The chrome toast-rack and the silver-bladed knives. Ordinary things. Look how she picks them up and puts them down, wipes her hands briskly on the edge of the table-cloth; she wouldn’t do that in company. She’s finished her egg, I can see the top jagged on the plate, a bit of butter that she pops into her mouth from the end of her knife. Now she’s gone for a bath and the kitchen’s empty. Silly kitchen without Louise.

It was easy for me to get in, the door was unlocked. I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances. It’s odd being in someone else’s room when they’re not there.
Especially when you love them. Every object carries a different significance. Why did she buy that? What does she especially like? Why does she sit in this chair and not that one? The room becomes a code that you have only a few minutes to crack. When she returns, she will command your attention, and besides it’s rude to stare. And yet I want to pull out the drawers and run my fingers under the dusty rims of the pictures. In the waste basket perhaps, in the larder, I will find a clue to you, I will be able to unravel you, pull you between my fingers and stretch out each thread to know the measure of you. The compulsion to steal something is ridiculous, intense. I don’t want one of your
EPNS
spoons, charming though they are, with a tiny Edwardian boot on the handle. Why then have I put it in my pocket? ‘Take it out at once,’ says the Headmistress who keeps an eye on my conduct. I managed to force it back into the drawer, although for a teaspoon it put up a lot of resistance. I sat down and tried to concentrate myself. Right in my eyeline was the laundry basket. Not the laundry basket … please.

I have never been a knicker-sniffer. I don’t want to lard my inner pockets with used underwear. I know people who do and I sympathise. It’s a dicey business going into a tense boardroom with a large white handkerchief on one side of the suit and a slender pair of knickers on the other. How can you be absolutely sure you remember which is where? I was hypnotised by the laundry basket like an out-of-work snake charmer.

I had just got to my feet when Louise strode through the door, her hair piled up on her head and pinned with a tortoiseshell bar. I could smell the steam on her from the bath and the scent of a rough woody soap. She held out her arms, her face softening with love, I took her two
hands to my mouth and kissed each slowly so that I could memorise the shape of her knuckles. I didn’t only want Louise’s flesh, I wanted her bones, her blood, her tissues, the sinews that bound her together. I would have held her to me though time had stripped away the tones and textures of her skin. I could have held her for a thousand years until the skeleton itself rubbed away to dust. What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?

In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.

She said, ‘Come upstairs.’

We climbed one behind the other past the landing on the first floor, the studio on the second, up where the stairs narrowed and the rooms were smaller. It seemed that the house would not end, that the stairs in their twisting shape took us higher and out of the house altogether into an attic in a tower where birds beat against the windows and the sky was an offering. There was a small bed with a patchwork quilt. The floor sheered to one side, one board prised up like a wound. The walls, bumpy and distempered, were breathing. I could feel them moving under my touch. They were damp, slightly. The light, channelled by the thin air, heated the panes of glass too hot to open. We were magnified in this high wild room. You and I could reach the ceiling and the floor and every side of our loving cell. You kissed me and I tasted the relish of your skin.

What then? That you, so recently dressed, lost your clothes in an unconscious pile and I found you wore a
petticoat. Louise, your nakedness was too complete for me, who had not learned the extent of your fingers. How could I cover this land? Did Columbus feel like this on sighting the Americas? I had no dreams to possess you but I wanted you to possess me.

It was a long time later that I heard the noise of schoolchildren on their way home. Their voices, high-pitched and eager, carried up past the sedater rooms and came at last, distorted, to our House of Fame. Perhaps we were in the roof of the world, where Chaucer had been with his eagle. Perhaps the rush and press of life ended here, the voices collecting in the rafters, repeating themselves into redundancy. Energy cannot be lost only transformed; where do the words go?

‘Louise, I love you.’

Very gently, she put her hand over my mouth and shook her head. ‘Don’t say that now. Don’t say it yet. You might not mean it.’

I was protesting with a stream of superlatives, beginning to sound like an advertising hack. Naturally this model had to be the best the most important, the wonderful even the incomparable. Nouns have no worth these days unless they bank with a couple of Highstreet adjectives. The more I underlined it the hollower it sounded. Louise said nothing and eventually I shut up.

‘When I said you might not mean it, I meant it might not be possible for you to mean it.’

‘I’m not married.’

‘You think that makes you free?’

‘It makes me freer.’

‘It also makes it easier for you to change your mind. I don’t doubt that you would leave Jacqueline. But would
you stay with me?’

‘I love you.’

‘You’ve loved other people but you still left them.’

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘I don’t want to be another scalp on your pole.’

‘You started this, Louise.’

‘I acknowledged it. We both started it.’

What was all this about? We had made love once. We had known each other as friends for a couple of months and yet she was challenging my suitability as a long-term candidate? I said as much.

‘So you admit that I am just a scalp?’

I was angry and bewildered. ‘Louise, I don’t know what you are. I’ve turned myself inside out to try and avoid what happened today. You affect me in ways I can’t quantify or contain. All I can measure is the effect, and the effect is that I am out of control.’

‘So you try and regain control by telling me you love me. That’s a territory you know, isn’t it? That’s romance and courtship and whirlwind.’

‘I don’t want control.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

No and you’re right not to believe me. If in doubt be sincere. That’s a pretty little trick of mine. I got up and reached for my shirt. It was under her petticoat. I picked up the petticoat instead.

‘May I have this?’

‘Trophy hunting?’

Her eyes were full of tears. I had hurt her. I regretted telling her those stories about my girlfriends. I had wanted to make her laugh and she had laughed at the time. Now I had strewn our path with barbs. She didn’t trust me. As a friend I had been amusing. As a lover I was lethal. I could
see that. I wouldn’t want to have much to do with me. I knelt on the floor and clasped her legs against my chest.

‘Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.’

She stroked my hair. ‘I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you’ve learned, forget them. Forget that you’ve been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it.’

‘How shall I prove it?’

‘I can’t tell you what to do.’

The maze. Find your own way through and you shall win your heart’s desire. Fail and you will wander for ever in these unforgiving walls. Is that the test? I told you that Louise had more than a notion of the Gothic about her. She seemed determined that I should win her from the tangle of my own past. In her attic room was a print of the Burne-Jones picture titled
Love and the Pilgrim
. An angel in clean garments leads by the hand a traveller footsore and weary. The traveller is in black and her cloak is still caught by the dense thicket of thorns from which they have both emerged. Would Louise lead me so? Did I want to be led? She was right, I hadn’t thought about the hugeness of it all. I had some excuse; I was thinking about Jacqueline.

It was raining when I left Louise’s house and caught a bus to the Zoo. The bus was full of women and children. Tired busy women placating cross excitable kids. One child had forced her brother’s head into his satchel, scattering schoolbooks over the rubber floor, enraging her pretty young mother to the point of murder. Why is none of this work included in the Gross National Product? ‘Because we don’t know how to quantify it,’ say the economists. They should try catching a bus.

I got off at the main entrance to the Animal House. The boy in the booth was bored and alone. He had his feet propped on the turnstile, the wet wind pushing through his window and spatting his micro TV. He didn’t look at me as I leaned for shelter against a perspex elephant.

‘Zoo’s shuttin’ in ten,’ he said mysteriously. ‘No admin after five pm.’

A secretary’s dream; ‘No admin after five pm.’ That amused me for two seconds and then I saw Jacqueline coming towards the gate, her beret pulled against the drizzle. She had a carrier bag full of food, leeks prodding through the sides.

‘Nite luv,’ said the boy without moving his lips.

She hadn’t seen me. I wanted to hide behind the perspex elephant, jump out at her and say, ‘Let’s go for dinner.’

I am often beset by such romantic follies. I use them as ways out of real situations. Who the hell wants to go for dinner at 5.30 pm? Who wants to have a sexy walk in the rain alongside thousands of home-time commuters, all like you, carrying a shopping bag full of food?

‘Stick to it,’ I told myself. ‘Go on.’

‘Jacqueline.’ (I sound like someone from the CID.)

She turned up her face, smiles and pleasure, handed me the bag and wrapped herself in the coat. She started walking towards her car, telling me about her day, there was a wallaby that had needed counselling, did I know that the Zoo used them in animal experiments? The Zoo decapitated them alive. It was in the interests of science.

‘But not in the interests of wallabies?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘And why should they suffer? You wouldn’t chop my head off, would you?’

I looked at her appalled. She was joking but it didn’t feel like a joke.

‘Let’s go and get some coffee and a bit of cake.’ I took her arm and we walked away from the carpark towards a homely tea-shoppe that normally served the outflow of the Zoo. It was pleasant when the visitors weren’t there and they weren’t there on that day. The animals must pray for rain.

‘You don’t usually pick me up from work,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘Is there something to celebrate?’

‘No.’

Condensation ran down the windows. Nothing was clear any more.

‘Is it about Louise?’

I nodded, twisting the cake fork between my fingers, pushing my knees against the underside of the dolls’ house table. Nothing was in proportion. My voice seemed too loud, Jacqueline too small, the woman serving doughnuts with mechanical efficiency parked her bosom on the glass counter and threatened to shatter it with mammary power. How she would skittle the chocolate eclairs and with a single plop drown her unwary customers in mock cream. My mother always said I’d come to a sticky end.

‘Are you seeing her?’ Jacqueline’s timid voice.

Irritation from gut to gullet. I wanted to snarl like the dog I am.

‘Of course I’m seeing her. I see her face on every hoarding, on the coins in my pocket. I see her when I look at you. I see her when I don’t look at you.’

I didn’t say any of that, I mumbled something about yes as usual but things had changed. THINGS HAD CHANGED, what an arsehole comment, I had changed things. Things don’t change, they’re not like the seasons moving on a diurnal round. People change things. There
are victims of change but not victims of things. Why do I collude in this mis-use of language? I can’t make it easier for Jacqueline however I put it. I can make it a bit easier for me and I suppose that’s what I’m doing.