by Deborah Levy
What a cunt. Lapinski told me I have no imagination. What do I need that for when my life could not be better than it is? On a good day, I’ve got quite a lot of things to look forward to. When they privatize prisons and water, I’ll be there for a slice of the cake. Yesterday I went to a pleasure dome with a colleague. We had T-Bone, as a matter of fact. I could have ordered three T-Bones but my stomach won’t take the stretch which pisses me off because I could have more of anything I want. Then we came back here and got rat-arsed on a bottle of Scotch. And another one. I didn’t feel a hundred per cent this morning. The boss crept up to me in his famous posh boy brogues and said something like ‘We don’t carry any fat, you know.’ Well I suppose fear is an executive tool, but fat? My mother went without so I could sleep at night without eating my fists. No one is going to make me feel bad about ordering Three T-Bones and giving two of them to my mother, but she doesn’t want my money. I visited her last weekend, she was playing chess with her neighbour and when I walked in (dressed specially in a new shirt) she said, ‘Son, you’re a prat. Look after your queen, Mrs R.’ One day I’ll shoot her and it’ll break my heart. I could buy her a car but she doesn’t respect me enough to say yes, yes son, thank you. Dunno how she wanted her son to grow up. Dunno what she wants of me. Tonight I’m going to a charity ball to help raise money for a children’s hospital – they’re raffling off a helicopter. I’ll get wrecked on champagne and help save babies with bone disease at the same time.
You have to take and then give a little bit back. You take a load and give back a slice. If I were to become strawberry jam under a tube train, the computers would carry on dealing without me; there are plenty more like me to feed the canon, to bribe and bully, to fill the bars and toy-town houses, to talk the talk and wear the uniform, to sell on dodgy everything and collect the annual bonus. People in my home town still talk about my father. He is a well-missed man. They don’t miss me and I don’t miss them.
Hopefully the firm will relocate me soon. To the South-East or around. No Lapinski there. No glue sniffers there. No Greek sausages, salt fish or funny bananas in the shops there. The flower beds have no weeds in them and no one stands out in a crowd. The publicans serve who they want to serve because they own the place and they like serving me.
A whole fresh salmon wrapped in foil with butter and herbs bakes in the oven. The napkins on the table are pale pink French linen, the cutlery silver, the glasses the thinnest, most fragile crystal. Marlene Dietrich croons from the compact disc player.
I, Lapinski, am in front of the mirror again. It seems The Banker and I are destined to meet backwards through the reflective surface of this glass. It was by the mirror my grandmother used to watch herself cry, first as a child and later as an adult. She was too proud to show her tears; instead when she felt the need to weep she would take from the drawer one of her many handkerchiefs, fold it on her lap, take off her eyeglasses and ritually begin. When she married and her husband caught her weeping one day by the glass he shook her by the shoulders so hard her hair, which she always scraped into a bun, fell loose and her combs scattered on the floor. ‘Why are you so cross?’ she had asked him. He replied tenderly putting the combs back in her hair, ‘I often want to cry because I hoped I would marry a beautiful woman – and what did I fall in love with? A woman with a wart under her arm and a mouth like a crack in a pie. But do I cry? No. I do not cry because she is everything to me and if she is sad I want to know why.’
They opened a bottle of vodka kept for special occasions, talking about their good days and less good days and the neighbour who kept carp in the bath ; it was only when they had finished half the bottle they remembered their daughter (my mother) was skating that afternoon to an audience of hundreds of school children. They arrived drunk, dishevelled and flushed, and embarrassed my mother by cheering loudly throughout her dance; afterwards she said their breath melted the ice and made her fall.
Through the looking glass I can see The Banker. She is slipping into a charcoal silk dress, goose pimples on her arms. Eduardo is shaving in the bathroom and shouts at her for leaving water on the floor after her bath. She flosses her teeth and says the maid will clean it up in the morning. Eduardo calls her ‘cats-breath’ and playfully holds the razor up to her throat making slicing gestures. ‘This is how you slice Parma ham,’ he says, and then tells her she’s lost her sense of humour.
Outside, the Innocents sit by the river drinking a bottle of sweet sherry. The girl has a violin bow in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She bows the boy’s ear and he makes the noise of a violin in his throat. Fifty yards away a policeman watches over them; the boy now takes the bow and runs it over the girl’s ear. She makes the noise of a violin in her throat. When they have finished the sherry they throw the bottle in the river. A helicopter hovers above them.
Jerry puts the last touches to his dinner table. With his golden ringlets curling under his earlobes, pale blue eyes and dimples he looks like a baby angel. At twenty-nine he has developed a slight lisp and when he smiles his tongue sticks out between his Cupid lips. A pianist/composer, quite famous in particular circles, his forte is to enchant his audience and introduce them to art and culture. He gives concerts for minor aristocrats in their rural homes, also at stately houses rented for the evening by various corporations and at numerous glitzy dinner parties. His experimental lisp and genuine love of shortbread baked by his adoring grandmother, who he lives with and who is also getting dressed for supper, all make him a delicious slightly wayward treat. He is much sought after and well-fucked by the sons of lords and dukes before they marry the women they will breed with and despise.
At this moment Grannie Bird, as she is called, is clipping a pair of ancient jet earrings on to her ears. She powders her soft smooth cheeks and remembers that she left her pot of rouge in the box at the Opera House in Milan.
The boy and girl watch the bottle of sherry bob up and down on the water. After a while the girl takes out a little box and shows it to the boy. Inside the box is a perfect set of long white false fingernails. She begins to put them on and the boy pushes back her cuticles with his own bitten fingernails. The policeman is baffled.
Eduardo, The Banker, Jerry and Grannie Bird sit at the candle-lit table drinking a light white wine with their fennel and Parmesan salad. Marlene sings ‘Fallink in love again’ and Eduardo, who has taken off his shoes, searches for his wife’s thighs under the table. Jerry is telling everyone about his last concert and how the host has promised to take him skiing in Europe for a weekend. Grannie Bird smiles; her teeth are like porcelain, and her blue eyes small and bright. ‘You will look like a little angel flying over the snow. Be sure to keep your fingers warm.’ The smell of salmon cooking wafts through the kitchen. Suddenly she says, ‘My dear, you smell of roses.’ She moves nearer The Banker and breathes deeply. ‘Roses and roses and roses.’ She gazes up into the chandelier. The Banker tells her there must be rose in her perfume. ‘Ah that is what it must be,’ sighs Grannie Bird, putting her knife and fork together. Eduardo tells them he has commissioned an artist to make prints of Warhol into tiles for their bathroom. The Banker tells Jerry she lost a hundred thousand pounds in the computer that morning and how it took her an hour to find it again. Eduardo nudges his toe under her knicker elastic. Jerry wraps one of his ringlets round and round his plump finger. Marlene sings ‘I can’t help it’; Grannie Bird wipes each corner of her lips with a napkin. Suddenly she moves back her chair and begins to tell a story.
‘On the tube this morning three Irish children, they must have been five, seven and nine years old, got into my carriage, and in their hands, my dear,’ she smiles at The Banker, ‘were the most beautiful pink and red roses. Long-stemmed and alert as a rose should be, they smelt like you, Gemma, it is your fragrance that reminds me. And these children started begging from passengers. First the little girl came up to me, held the rose under my nose and said, “Give us some money for food then.” I shook my head and she went away. Then the l
ittle boy came up to me, his eyes as green as green, his hair shaved off, face heart-shaped and . . .’ Grannie Bird puts her fingertips together ‘. . . tragic. He also pinned the rose right under my nose and said, “Give us some money for food then.” I shook my head. He said, “Please please please please please please please,” pushing the rose into my face until I found myself blushing and delved into my pocket for some loose change. He said, “Give us a pound, I don’t want less than a pound.” I gave him substantially less than a pound, just the few coins I had. Perhaps twenty pence. All the time he pressed the rose into my face. “Please please please please I grew these flowers with Mama.”’
Grannie Bird makes the sound of a little dog whining please please please. Jerry giggles and makes a rose from his pink napkin, which he presents to her with a little bow of his golden head.
‘Thank you, Sir.’
She smiles at Eduardo.
‘That rose smelt like the roses of my childhood. Of the world I grew up in. The woods a haze of bluebells, oh they looked like a Monet, and the light . . . if you appreciate light . . . early-morning mists, cuckoos in spring, the woodpecker, pheasants, wild rabbits. That rose made me think of my own mother in her gardening gloves, pruning her rose bushes; she planned her roses every year and people who visited from the city always took one or two back with them. English roses. When they were full-blown, petals would fall on the walnut sideboard, there were vases of them all over the house, and I would save them to press in heavy old books.’
Eduardo shuts his eyes. He is bored. His toe wriggles from side to side, Gemma silently mouths ‘EEEEEEK’; Marlene sings ‘Vhat am I to do?’ and Jerry fills everyone’s glass.
‘My world was a peaceful thoughtful world. We basked in gardens we ourselves had created. Gentle sunlight, straw hats, white gloves, scones, homemade jams, lazy days picking blackberries in September, happy happy days. We knew the names of the children of all our servants and never forgot their birthdays. Bees hovered about the lavender bushes, our cook gave us muslin from the kitchen to make sachets of the stuff for our top drawers. My parents honeymooned in Europe for two years in a horse-drawn caravan. The house was always full of artists and actors. I spent my childhood on horses and my adolescence posing under the apple tree for young men in silk scarves. My father was a wonderful host and my mother, although she never made much fuss about it, painted little watercolours, with brushes especially imported from China. Dragonflies we thought of as fairies, yes those were happy day. My uncle tickling trout, rugs and hampers and lemonade. A hundred strokes to the hair last thing at night. We appreciated life. Lived it to the full, wanted it to last for ever and ever. Do you know, my dears, I have seven generations of earls in my larynx . . .’
Jerry nudges her arm. ‘Grannie, tell us about the little boy.’
‘Oh yes. I gave him the money and he went away. I shouted “GIVE ME THE ROSE THEN” . . . he looked as if he was going to kill me. You see, although other passengers had given money, they had not asked for the rose. They were just glad to be left alone. I am made of sterner stuff, and shouted again, “I gave you the money now you can give me the rose.” So he gave it to me. And then he started to cry. His sister rummaged in her pockets and found a pencil which she gave to him and he went round with that instead, holding it under people’s noses as if it was a rose. And when someone gave him money and demanded the pencil his sister gave him her hair slide . . . she just took it out of her hair there and then . . . he went around with that saying, “Give us some money for food then?” And when someone took the hair slide his younger sister turned out her pockets and found a half-eaten sandwich. So he put that under some gent’s nose and the man said, “You’ve got food,” pointing to the sandwich. “What do you want money for?”
The Banker claps her hands. ‘Play for us, Jerry.’ Eduardo joins in, ‘Play play play play.’ Grannie Bird leaves the table, her long black velvet dress whispering along the carpet as she walks to the kitchen and opens the oven. The candles flicker as Jerry sings
‘Oh, Susannah won’t you answer
with her hand her face she’s hiding
some adventure, some adventure I shall see.’
Eduardo is telling his wife about his meeting with a Japanese financier at an oyster and champagne bar in Soho. How they both agreed when the deal had been made that business was not too difficult and totally immoral which is why they both liked it. Jerry tosses his ringlets
‘With her hand her face is hiding.’
Grannie Bird carries in the salmon. It is so big it flops over the sides of the baking tray. She puts it down on the table. It is steaming. She unwraps the foil and is just about to poke a long thin knife into its belly, when the salmon seems to take its last breath. It rises from the dish and gasps. Melted butter runs over its eyes. The Banker, who has been embarrassed by fish before, looks at it with interest. She bites her lip. Grannie Bird says to Jerry, ‘Cut the fish will you darling.’ Jerry takes the knife from her, his little plump hands shaking slightly. Eduardo moves his toe inside his wife’s knickers. The Banker says, ‘Eeeeeeek.’ Grannie Bird fiddles with the cutlery. Jerry cuts into the fish and Eduardo’s plate is held out for the first sliver of pale orange pink flesh.
The terrible strange sight of ten minutes ago is uncommented on, as if saying something will confirm it actually happened. No one touches their salmon. They eat the petits pois, potatoes, broccoli, break bread rolls and dip them into the mayonnaise and parsley sauce, pushing the fish to the side of their plates, talking of summer holidays, the exchange rate, property, obituary columns, and magazines they subscribe to.
Grannie Bird puts a bottle of port, five jade glasses and a whole Stilton on the table. She tells them the way to eat it is to scoop out the middle with a little silver spoon. Jerry hands round a bowl of walnuts, singing
‘This is shameless
what presumption!
I forbid you to come near.’
Grannie Bird pops chocolates on her grandson’s tongue and peals with laughter as he pretends to pant for more. Eduardo puts his shoes back on and sits on the cream leather settee with a glass of port. A block of passion-fruit sorbet melts unnoticed on the trolley. The Banker looks at the salmon. She is curious and takes a flat silver knife to cut a tiny piece of flesh off its belly, puts it on her tongue and chews it very slowly as if assessing its flavour. I catch her eye as she spits it out into her napkin and re-glosses her lips. She gargles with rosé and spits that out into the napkin too. As she breaks a match in half and picks her teeth with it, she turns to me, cheeks flushed.
‘I think, Lapinski, this is the terrible trick of one of your friends. This fish has the possessed eye of a poet and tastes just as useless. In fact it tastes like a melancholy misfit. I have always hated poetry, I prefer hard mathematics or even hard drugs. Do you really think that in consuming this pescado I would consume its ideas? I have spat them out again and again. And what is The Idea? That there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird? Give it to me, I’ll take it to the market and show you sixty ways of looking at it. Poets are fuckwits. They try and legislate with language but they don’t have the roubles to bribe. On my aunt’s salmon farm they stroke the belly of hen salmon to squeeze out their eggs for breeding. Well, I have squeezed you out too.’
This is shameless
what presumption
I forbid you to come near.
Jerry sticks his tongue into the middle of the Stilton, eases it in a little further and looks at Eduardo.
‘Do you think I am a cannibal, Lapinski? That I eat consciousness? You fucking piss-artist. That you should try and infiltrate me so deviously. You have delusions of grandeur.’
so coy then
just to tease me . . . la la la
I know why you’re waitin’ here
Jerry’s tongue is covered in Stilton. Eduardo has fallen asleep.
‘You fucking village idiot. You’ve spent too long in steamy kitchens making dumplings and kasha for broken
people in broken shoes.’
She looks for her car keys.
I do like to be beside the seaside
I do like to be beside the sea
Grannie Bird sings in a quivering high voice, swaying her velvet hips in time with the piano.
The Banker slams her foot down on the accelerator of her Mercedes; smoke steams out of the exhaust and her hands, on the wheel, are white with fury. It is as if years of anger and fatigue are burning through her charcoal silk body. This time when she looks into the mirror she does not cut me out. Her eye is blue as petrol.
‘You, Lapinski, are the dinosaur trapped in ice from the age of slow-moving beings. I sit on trains rolling through the remains of the Industrial Revolution in a first class carriage reserved for me, briefcase by my side, computer on my lap, telephone under my chin, groomed, prepared to lead and steer and direct and instruct, all the while eating warm baked cheesecake prepared for me by my housekeeper. These are the crumbs offered to me, along with tickets for musicals, dinners at Maxim’s, trips in hot-air balloons, cruises on the Thames, for the stress, for the erosion of my sleep, for the thumping of my blood-pressure, for my loss of connection with losers like you. I understand myself perfectly. I do not have to search for reason or meaning or why or what or how. I know who I am and what I do.
‘I own a prestige apartment facing the sparkle of the river, with south-facing views, a private car park, porter, video security, entry phone, swimming pool and a sauna to nurture my health, which is after all my wealth. I am given all this for good reason. I am valued; I am an irresistible proposition to men in parliaments and tycoons on committees and entrepreneurs of all kinds; my condom case bulges with the promise of liaison and adventure. I am the new pioneer; the great adventure of my generation is to destabilize everything and everyone.
‘In my prestige apartment I am Madame de Sade. My phone never stops ringing; it is my Beethoven, speaking into it is oral sex, my shining black cock, I press buttons, phone up New York every evening, find out how the markets close, and sometimes, when Eduardo goes down on me, I wrap the cord around his neck until he begs me for mercy. If he survives, we go out to eat, or see another musical, or go to the first night of a movie, or the opening of an exhibition. I have a very special kind of love play, my instruments are straps and straddles and bulls and bears and strangles and strategies and bells and bonds and whistles. I play my own and other people’s destruction silkily and easily. I calculate crashes; I am a whore in the marketplace, I do a lotta rough trade.