by Deborah Levy
She says, ‘A friend of mine recently lost her hand on the meatbelt, you know . . . better to lose your marbles than your hand, don’t you think? In my next metamorphosis I’m going to be a Professor of Madness and I’ll say to my students, If you want to know what health is, first you must know what sickness is: go and look at the way desks are arranged in offices and ask every Senior Manager and CEO what kinds of strategies they have in place to make their employees feel uneasy and ask career politicians what it is they do not believe in and ask the pornography industry what it is they are selling and ask farmers if there’s any reason why hens should be able to move freely and ask the pharmaceutical industry if it’s ever thought of bribing doctors to use its products and ask the floggers and hangers if their parents were kind to them and ask the present what’s it’s got to do with the past – and if it’s true that hope does not die last, it dies first, does anybody know where the bodies are buried?’
She stands up and thanks me for the Jammie Dodger.
In another part of London, Jerry sings
‘for-give . . . me
for-give . . . me
for-give . . . me’
And Eduardo joins in
‘per-do-no
per-do-no
per-do-no.’
In the little restaurant which pays my rent and where people eat lamb stew and read newspapers in a variety of languages, the woman with the broken Chinese umbrella sits opposite me and says, ‘Lapinski, my friend is dying.’ I pour salt on to the aubergines I have just sliced and she watches it turn the flesh of the vegetable brown. ‘At the hospital, by his bed, we no longer talk about what is right or wrong. We talk about parks and we talk about bread.’ Her eyelashes are silver, her cheekbones sharp. ‘He loves a particular park in Paris and how the hedges are sculpted and we pretend we will go back to visit it with two baguettes in our rucksack.’ She smiles and the sun shines on her see-through hands, the veins a nest of blue snakes. ‘I am clearing out his room for him. It is not his personal correspondence that makes me feel strange – it is his objects. A little horse made from lead. A duck’s egg. A candle in the shape of a cactus. They seem suspended in time, like a miracle.’ She take the aubergines and squeezes them in her hands until their juice trickles into a saucer. Her left palm is covered in little white seeds. After a while she says, ‘Why the silence?’
I tell her how my father, a docker, always found time to take me to the public baths where he held my wrists and floated me out into the middle of the pool. So I would not be frightened of the deep, he made little boats out of paper and sailed them a short distance away from me. In this way he taught me how to swim. And how my mother changed from the clothes she wore to make engines for tractors, into the sparkling taffeta skirt with spangles and sequins, glittering as she danced for the sheer fun of getting dizzy; and how she would eat beetroot which she loved more than chocolate, and leave little red kiss marks on my cheeks and hands. She nods and smiles. ‘No one can read our thoughts even if they think they can.’
For some reason her words make me remember the helicopter I saw in the sky the night before. From the thirteenth floor of The Poet’s high-rise flat. How it had a yellow beam shooting down, searching for someone. In gardens, down roads, through the windows of houses. Although it was unlikely, I had felt scared in case they were searching for me and I did not know what I had done. But the most frightening thing of all was I felt they did not know what I had done either.
Swallowing Geography
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
1
The Tadpole Fields
‘When you feel fear, does it have detail or is it just a force?’ The gold filling in Gregory’s front tooth shines into J. K.’s eye. ‘I can’t hear you.’
They are sitting in a bar surrounded by mirrors etched with the Eiffel Tower at Roissy airport, Paris. Brand names like Segafredo, Perrier, Dior, Kronenbourg 1664, Chanel spin like planets above them. The large blonde Californian waitress slams two cocktails down on the table.
‘They’re killers,’ she says.
‘It is as if Paris is muffled. I hear it at low volume.’
J.K. says nothing because these days Gregory’s voice is very quiet, as if frightened to let it out of his big body. She catches odd words like nausea, chestpain, The Baltic States, mother, father, aspirin, and sometimes she catches his eye.
‘Look at the inscription in this book.’
She moves closer to the secret in his body that tames his voice. It is an old volume of short stories printed in 1941 on thin transparent paper.
‘Leave this book at the Post Office when you have read it, so that men and women in the services may enjoy it too.’
The day before, they walked to Pigalle in silence, arm in arm, stopping to watch transvestite whores lean against cars and walls, put on lipstick, smoke cigarettes, call out to men passing by, their steamy drugged gaze settling on this man and that man and then somewhere else.
‘What kind of cultural virus taught those boys to stick their hips out like that, and pout and press their breasts across the other side of the road?’ Gregory says.
‘Do you fancy them?’
‘They’re gorgeous. I like that one over there with the long black plait . . . it comes down to his knees, can you see . . . in the hat with the red feather.’
COME AND TALK TO ME! It is an eerie staccato voice. The voice of cigarette advertisements, fierce sun, a two-bit bar with dead flies on the floor. They turn round to see they are standing outside a pinball arcade, CASINO spelt in coloured lightbulbs above the door. COME AND TALK TO ME! The yankee growling voice comes from a silver and chrome machine. On its screen a square muscled man jumps up and down in a computerized urban landscape of skyscrapers and highways. Hands in raincoat pocket, jaw jerking to one side, he drawls again, COME AND TALK TO ME!
Gregory nudges J.K.’s arm. ‘Well, listen to the man, let’s take up his invitation.’ He puts ten francs in the slot.
HOW YA DOING? says the man. TYPE SOMETHING INTO THE KEYBOARD AND I WILL RESPOND. The screen whirs as the urban cowboy crosses his arms and leans towards them.
‘It’s in English.’
‘Well, tell him how you are.’
Gregory turns to face the man. He puts another ten francs into the machine and spreads out his fingers. Pink and blue bulbs flash above him.
Do your lips burn up when kissed right? Let me kiss ’em baby. Let me let me let me. I would like to fuck you. I would like to make you happy. How do you like to be touched? On the aeroplane over here, the air hostess demonstrated various ways of surviving an aircrash. She said we must blow on a whistle to draw attention to ourselves. Don’t you think that is a little narcissistic? If everyone in the everyday of their lives who wanted to draw attention to themselves blew a whistle where would we be? What do you do to make people love you? I do cheap things to make people like me. I make them feel more important than they are and flatter them and when someone makes me a great cocktail I take a sip and shout DRAGONFLIES! In England I light my cigarettes with matches made in Yugoslavia. The picture on the box is of ‘Scenic Cornwall’ and shows a number of signposts on the edge of a cliff. One of them says THE FALKLANDS 8109 and the other says AUSTRALIA 170001. Itell you this because when I was a boy I collected stamps. It was my way of naming places and conquering the world. A stamp is a small picture. So I had lots of small pictures of the world. Madagascar, China, Mexico, Argentina, Egypt. A kind of virtual reality.
What’s your name, my sweet? Is it Johnny or Sam or Brett? I’d like to go down on you and for you to talk to me about football and religion and hamburgers and beauty and death and what it feels like to come. Were you bullied at school? When you were a teenager did you spend hours in your bedr
oom changing your clothes? Did you save up to buy the boots and shirts other kids had? What kind of Darwinian programmed you? Do you want to change yourself in any way? Like speak in a deeper voice or have a different nose? Do you feel safe in this world? Or do you feel alone and scared? What kind of gadgets do you have in your home? Do they comfort you? Baby do you sometimes feel glum? Baby take care of yourself. Oh baby I’d like to stroke you and whisper things to you and make you not have fear.
Honey, I want to tell you about a train I took to Kiev with my bit of squeeze. We made love just as we got near Chernobyl and the loudspeakers in our carriage played a kind of lament to mark the tragedy of the nuclear accident. In some way it seemed to mark all tragedy ever. The cries of our lovemaking as we passed infected cattle, children with shaved heads playing by the railway tracks and the eerie stillness of deformed trees were the only sound, snow falling, he and I sweating in each other’s arms and honey we were, at that moment, without fear. The high-rise blocks of flats we stayed in were called The Sleeping Region. I was brought up in a block like that in London. As a kid we lived on tins of beans and meatballs and hated to sleep because we were frightened. Darling, do you sleep sweet and easy and deep? Does someone sleep beside you? Breathing into the pillow next to you and you wake up first and feel them there and it’s just so great that they’re there and you know very soon they will wake too and you will move closer and kind of pull in the beginning of a new day together? In Kiev I opened tins of crab meat and caviar bought with hard currency and we slept easy. We slept easy and there was a famine outside. The circus played every night in Kiev – an old man sitting next to me made a joke about eating the cats and horses after the show. Are you happy with your life, my sweet? The man said, ‘You can always tell a tourist, their eyes don’t know where they’re going. Here everyone knows where they’re going.’ Do you know where you’re going baby? Is it a good place? Something to write home about? Is home a good place? Or just somewhere to return to?
Are you pleased to open your eyes in the morning? What do you see? Do you like what you see? If you hate it do you feel you have any power to change it for something else? Oh my love, let me call you that – My Love – let us imagine what that means, you and I liplocked some place in the American South, perhaps where the Klan lynched our brothers? You and I in a motor on the highway making plans for the future. The radio is on and we hear the Soviet Union has come apart and then there are some ads for Pepsi and bagel chips, and back to a war in Yugoslavia, nationalisms and internationalisms, an election in Great Britain, refugees crossing mountains looking for a country to feed them, a jingle for vitamin capsules, and all the time we are hot for each other, through all this world news we just want to be in each other’s pants, and we pull in for gas and I’m saying, No baby don’t light a cigarette right now, wait till we pull out and anyhow we’ll check into a motel soon. Hey Brett, I’m Imagining America! It’s all from movies and magazines, I’m fumbling to make you America. I’m fumbling to make you and unmake you. Abe Lincoln on your dollar bills – IN GOD WE TRUST – pastrami and gas and tacos and beer bought with his image, he’s the guy that keeps the wheels turning. I’m stuffing chocolate into your mouth and baby . . . you’re so hard, so hard honey . . . you’re all fired up and I’m talkin’ dirty, I’m talking physical, I’m talking politics and dontcha just love it, got my fingers in your armpit and you’re sweating bad. I want you too baby I want you too. Y’know that Springsteen song . . . oh baby I’d drive all night again jus’ to buy you a pair of shoes? Well I would. I’d drive to hell and back jus’ to make you love me.How do you love? Do you keep it quiet and put it all in your fingertips or do you say words? What are your lovewords baby? What if the United States came apart? Would God come apart too and the stone pillars of the Abe Lincoln memorial crumble and statues of George Washington be torn up from squares of green, watered by sprinklers? Torn up by crane and bulldozer?
Now I am imagining Switzerland, Brett. I can see snow and stripped pine floors and coffee shops and cream cakes and blond people tinkling little silver spoons against their cups. I see children in nursery schools that are heated, very warm and very clean and their little snow boots lined up against the wall and gloves sewn into their coat pockets. I can’t imagine you there, Brett. I’m trying to see a teacher bent over your shoulder while you draw your mother and father and the house you live in and giant flowers – but I just can’t vision you in Switzerland skiing and eating chocolate. You’d probably shoot up in your chalet, lie down in your shorts under the skylight, arms folded behind your neck looking up at the stars dreaming of home and bourbon and cookies and having a haircut. You see how I’m making you up, same as Switzerland and America? Does it feel like it fits you? Have you made me up too? Am I some kind of English faggot crazy for boys, cruising into my adult life in black leather under strobe and sonic boom of city discos? There’s such a lot to talk about baby, just you and me, man to man. Did you hear about the man who went to a psychologist and said, Doctor I think I’m a dog, and the doctor said, we’ll soon sort that out, now get on the couch. And the man said, but I’m not allowed. Well I’m inviting you to be whatever you like sweetheart, I’m listening to you, I’m listening to everything you want to be and were not allowed. Brett, I’m saying make yourself up for me baby, have as many goes as you like, be the man you always wanted to be, and I’ll be the man that lets you. Brett, life is long dontcha think? When you tot up the hours and days and months it’s a lot of time. How much of that time have you felt precious? I want to make you feel precious, my treasure, my lovestuff. Have you ever driven across a city you don’t know very well and you’re alone? It’s night and you’re lost. Had too many beers in some bar where they look at you as if you’re an extraterrestrial immigrant and somewhere else, in another city, there’s someone who loves you and you imagine them looking at you in this bar now, checking you out, what shoes you’ve put on today and what you’re drinking and what kind of mood you’re in? And you want to say to the people in this bar who think you’re some kind of weirdo blown in to undo them – I am connected to the same things as you y’know – I have people who love me and I watch TV and I have a birthday and I brush my teeth and I’m not always like this, eating crap pizza alone and lost with this look in my eyes. And then you get into the car and none of the street signs makes sense, and you just cry. Brett, have you done this? And you think of all the people you’ve jilted meanly and all the people who dumped you, and your pockets are full of old bills and tickets and you turn over all the secrets you carry inside you?
SOUNDS LIKE YA NEED SOME HELP! The handsome urban cowboy uncrosses his thick arms and takes out a gun. Suddenly he jumps on to a moving car, shoots, jumps off the car and thrashes a man across the head with his gun, runs, leaps over a motorcycle, crouches, shoots, climbs up a skyscraper, hangs on with one hand, shoots with the other, kicks a man chasing him off the building, shoots him in mid-air, dives through a pane of glass, shoots two three four five six other men, runs on to the roof of the skyscraper, flags down a helicopter, gets into it and pours bullets into the heart of the city – a loop of shooting and dying and dying and shooting and shooting and dying and then the voice says . . . COME AND TALK TO ME . . .
‘I can’t hear you, Greg,’ J.K. says in the airport lounge.
‘I know.’
‘Have you seen a doctor?’
‘Yeah.’
They finish their cocktails in silence.
‘Look.’
J.K. opens her mouth and shows him the bloody gap where a tooth should be.
Gregory stares at her. Black flecks float in his green eyes.
‘What happened?’
‘I got slugged.’
‘By who?’
‘My mother. Knocked a tooth out.’
‘Lillian?’
Their flight number comes up on the screen and they walk to the gate for take-off.
‘Tell me about getting slugged.’
The aeroplane shudders and t
hey put on their seat belts.
2
The Terrible Rages of Lillian Strauss
Her mother comes towards her carrying a black suitcase. J.K. walks three paces, takes the bag from her mother’s hands and says, when I walked towards you, something inside me walked too. Some beast that has taken up residence inside me, that inhabits the colony of my interior, that has decided to inhabit me against my will, walked with me towards you. It lifted up each of its four legs and walked the three paces with me. The petrol winds from the Texaco petrol station wake her up blowing through the open window, and instead of birds, the panicky whir of the carwash. Later, on her balcony, J.K. sees the camellia she planted last year has blossomed. One pink bud, opening and opening, just as she in sleep is opening and her mother sliding in behind her eyes.
Lillian Strauss is J.K.’s mother.
Her mother says, in Singapore every evening at six o’clock, a tray of drinks would be brought in by a servant. Gin and tonic, an ice bucket, lemon and bitters. We would drink until we went to bed, dropped on cotton pillows. Your uncle had a grog’s blossom for a nose, purple-veined, a great bloom. J.K. thinks of her camellia blossoming on a concrete balcony in a poor part of London, opening and opening.
Her mother, in another poor part of London, walks the streets in one of her rages. She is mouthing words to lamp-posts and parked cars; she is weeping and she is drunk. Her husbands have left her, her children have left her, her beauty has left her, she is filling the holes of absence with gin-scented tears and, like the suitcase, she wants to be carried, lifted into a sweeter present.