Eating Air

by Pauline Melville

  He waved her a kiss as he drove away. She waited a few minutes before driving away herself.

  There was no-one to whom she could tell the whole truth either.

  A Word from the Narrator

  Sitting here in the Head in the Sand café I have to admit to an attack of the hots when I write about Ella in Hector’s arms. I’ve always carried a torch for her. In fact, writing it made me push my black coffee aside and rush off home to have sex with my own wife Ma Brigitte. Luckily we live nearby in a fashionably converted slaughterhouse – you know, revealed brickwork and so on. Yes. That’s what happens to writers. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last to excuse myself in the middle of describing that sort of scene. Not that jealousy would do me much good. Ella long ago lost her heart to someone else.

  Ma Brigitte did the honours. My wife is a tough-talking woman with long red hair. She’s always weighed down with heavy gold necklaces and earrings and swathed in a purple shawl. In her youth she too was a virtuoso dancer, known for rubbing hot peppers into her genitals to liven up her sexual partners. Afterwards she fed me with rice and black beans, coconut meat, grilled corn and my favourite smoked mackerel. Then she sent me back to work.

  I know full well that narrators, like assassins, are supposed to keep in the background but I flout that rule when I feel like it. I see nothing wrong with the narrator occasionally showing the reader what he is doing in the same way that an architect might escort his client around a building in progress. Being a narrator is like being some sort of god. The characters, poor souls, are human. The odds are against them.

  Let me take time by the tail and swing it round my head for a minute.

  Part Two

  Of all history I understand nothing but revolt.

  Flaubert

  Chapter Fourteen

  One May morning in 1970 Ella de Vries, at the age of seventeen, waited on the platform of Preston station for the 11.35 AM train to London. She wore a pale primrose yellow dress that made her dark eyes and hair seem blacker than ever. Her hairline was low, her black eyes slanting and wide set. She had an attractive forward-thrusting mouth with a small mole above the top lip that made both men and women want to kiss it and she carried herself with the classically straight back of a dancer. The other members of the Royal Ballet had finished their last touring date in Manchester the previous night and returned to London. Ella was the youngest member of the company. She had made the unnecessary detour to Preston for reasons of love.

  To fall in love is to nurture a secret. Even a stranger can sense it. One or two of the passengers on the platform caught the glint of self-contained excitement in her eyes. She had told nobody that she was going to Preston or why. Her mother used to complain to Ella’s father about this trait in her daughter:

  ‘Why is she so secretive?’

  Ella sat down on the wooden seat and placed her bag on the ground beside her. Soft breezes lathered her face. Diadems of raindrops from an earlier shower trembled along the edge of the station sign. The green telegraph of spring signalled from tree to tree behind the station buildings opposite. The whole world around her felt aphrodised.

  The young man who was the unknowing cause of this turbulence was nowhere near Preston. He was leaning against the green table in a Soho billiard hall, smoking in stereo with a cigarette in each hand and one behind his ear. A quiff of gleaming chestnut hair fell over his forehead as he waited for the golden explosion of whisky to enliven him with its rush through the body.

  Ella had not expected to find him in Preston. But she had been unable to resist a quick visit to the city. He had spent some of his childhood there and that was enough for her. In the manner of the lovesick she wanted to breathe the air he had once breathed and roam the streets of the city where he had once lived. Calf love, the adolescent crush of a fanzine reader – whatever it was, her fate had been sealed by the sight of a coltish ankle a few weeks earlier.

  The slow milk-train from Manchester to Preston early that morning creaked and groaned as it set off. The empty compartment reeked of stale cigarette smoke. There was a small mirror over the seats under the rack and Ella pushed her tongue under her top lip to examine the mole there, always fearful of it growing bigger. She stretched out face-down on the seat, one leg dangling to the floor and let the rough fabric prickle her cheek. Dust from the upholstery made her nostrils tingle. She examined the pattern of the material in the dim light. It was dull and regular with the rusty red markings and dark blue design of cheap carpeting.

  After a while she lowered the thick leather belt a few notches to open the grimy window and lean out into the fresh dawn air. The train rumbled past a huge ruined red-brick cotton mill standing by a canal. Early morning sun caught a multitude of broken window panes, as many square panes as a slab of butterscotch. Sunlight flared off the glass, flashing and distracting attention from the burnt-out dereliction of the interior. One half of the building still functioned as a work place. A grubby white sheet hung from one of the windows. On it was painted in black capital letters: HILLYARDS WORKERS OCCUPATION. SUPPORT DEMOCRACY AGAINST CAPITALISM.

  Ella withdrew back into the carriage and sat down. The mounting industrial unrest that was rumbling through Britain, the strikes and mountains of rubbish in the streets, had failed entirely to penetrate the enclosed world of ballet. Ballet had its own history that wove its way untouched through revolutions and wars.

  Twenty minutes later the train pulled into Preston and Ella set off to explore the streets. Even in the sunshine, the Victorian red brick buildings exhaled an air of industrial exhaustion. The terraced houses were low enough for a wide stretch of sky to be visible over the roofs. After walking for ten minutes she came across a junior school. In the playground knots of children formed and re-formed like viziers plotting and conspiring at court. She rested her head against the iron railings and watched them. Perhaps this was the school he had attended.

  He told her once that he had been cast as Tinkerbell in the school play. The teacher must have had a sense of humour. The Tinkerbell costume for the fierce-eyed little boy consisted of steel toe-capped boots, thick socks and short trousers over which jutted a crepe paper tutu. His close-cropped hair, like iron filings pulled upright by a magnet, earned him the nickname ‘Bristle-Bonce’. For the performance he had been given a big school hand-bell which he rang vigorously every time he came on stage demanding that people believe in him. The audience laughed whenever he appeared. This he could not understand. It left him feeling mildly affronted. He felt that people should accept divinity when they saw it. Later, he set fire to the school toilets.

  That was another of his attractions. Ella fell in love with him, as Dido had with Aeneas, because he was a box of stories.

  Ella’s aimless wandering around Preston lasted for two hours. Then she made her way back to the station. She reached the station with a sense of mission accomplished, satisfied that the energy she had expended in going to Preston would in some magical way bring him back. Because Donny McLeod, the young man who was the cause of all this turmoil, had disappeared.

  For Ella de Vries falling in love had been a sudden and violent descent, a plunge downward into passion. As soon as she set eyes on the pale narrow face and the down-slanting green eyes she fell in love with him. For her it was like the shock of seeing a wild animal let loose in the drawing-room. She saw no warning signs in the crescent-shaped dent on his forehead or the unnerving thinness of his lips. When she first set eyes on him it was as if the top of her head came off and she rose straight up to the ceiling. She felt that her bloodstream had been irreversibly altered and started to flow in the opposite direction. It was an encounter from which there was no withdrawal.

  Now she sat on the station bench flicking through the newspaper. In the distance a toy-sized train waited on a glinting skein of railway lines for the signal to change. To encourage an interest in dance the Royal Ballet had sent some of the younger members on a tour of the north to perform excerpts from both the c
lassical and modern repertoire in schools. Ella passed over the news items: the Vietnam war protests; the bombings in Ireland and London; the sombre warnings of growing unrest over the Industrial Relations Bill. She turned straight to the arts’ review section. The paper had sent its main ballet critic to cover the last date of their tour. It had been easy for the young dancers to pick out the critic from the rows of teachers and schoolchildren assembled in the school hall. He looked like a banker, immaculately dressed, balding with a pinkish face and silver hair. He sat in the front row, notebook in hand accompanied by a young blond man with an angelic face. Ella turned to the inner pages and read the three sentence review of her performance as the Partisan in The Green Table:

  ‘Elissa de Vries moved with grace. For so young a dancer there was something elemental in the performance. I was reminded that there is danger in the body.’

  Ella put the newspaper in her bag, feeling elated. She made up her mind to go straight to class as soon as the train reached London. It seemed that love had fertilised everything around her; love had decked the trees with bud-sprays, blossoms and green foliage; love caused the bee to nuzzle the flower stamens in the hanging basket over the Waiting Room behind her. She drew a deep breath as if she wanted to fill her lungs with the scent of spring.

  Minutes later the toy-sized train that had been waiting on the points metamorphosed into the huge steam train with buffet cars that glided slowly in front of her and came to a halt. She hoisted up her bag, climbed on board and was already dozing when they passed the fading adverts from a defunct industrial era painted on the brick buildings alongside the railway line: ‘Percy Brothers – Hotspur Press’; ‘Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls Keep You All Aglow’; ‘Hearsey’s Removal Firm – Careful Since 1890’. All the heart had gone out of them.

  The train rocked her and she slept until she reached London.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The love explosion happened like this.

  One day after rehearsal at Covent Garden Ella de Vries leaped up the rackety stairs to her flat two-at-a-time clutching tea-bags and a packet of biscuits. Ella shared a flat in Old Compton Street with an American girl called Hetty Moran. The flat was on the second floor above an Indian restaurant called ‘Shafi’s’. It smelled permanently of curry but the rent was cheap and it was close to Covent Garden. There were two adjacent flats on the third floor divided by a partition wall in a botched conversion job. Both flats had cream-painted front doors made of plywood which stood at right angles to each other on a tiny landing. Ella walked daily to class or rehearsal through the Soho streets, surrounded by smells of rotting vegetables, freshly ground coffee, and garbage. The flat adjacent to Ella’s was rented by Cyrus Vance, one of the accompanists at the Royal Ballet School.

  At the top of the stairs she knocked on Cyrus’s door. His flat was the smaller of the two, a poky L-shaped room with two narrow beds set against the walls. Both beds were covered with what looked like grey prison-issue blankets. He had somehow managed to cram in an upright piano opposite one of the beds. A bleary-eyed Cyrus opened the door. He had short wavy marmalade coloured hair and a pale face. The skin around his lips was raw red from a bad cold and from too much rough kissing of other male mouths. He took the shopping which she handed him.

  ‘Oh you are a bona palone. Come in and have a cup of tea.’ The room reeked of Vick’s vapo-rub and frowzy blankets. Cyrus had been in bed for three days with flu. Ella sat on the edge of the bed as far away from him as possible.

  ‘Are you feeling better?’

  He snuffled. His eyes streamed.

  ‘Not much. How’s Aida going?’ Ella was on loan from the ballet company to dance the part of one of the slave girls at the Royal Opera House.

  ‘It’s OK. My mum came to see it. All she said was, “You can see everything through that dress.”’

  ‘Mothers. You can’t please them,’ Cyrus sniffed.

  Wearing jeans and a red polo-neck sweater, Ella sat on the edge of the bed trying not to breathe in his germs. Then out of the blue came a fierce knuckle-rap on the door. The rap turned into an impatient thumping. The door nearly gave way. Cyrus put his cup on top of the piano and crawled over her outstretched legs to open the door but before he could reach it the flimsy lock broke and the door flung open.

  Framed in the doorway was a young man, lean and blazing with energy. He was supporting himself against the door post with one hand while the other nursed his raised ankle. He looked momentarily nonplussed at seeing Ella as if he had expected to find Cyrus alone. His hair gleamed a dark reddish brown, the colour of a Highland peat burn. It rose at the front from a widow’s peak into a shining chestnut sea-roll. His complexion was clear and pale. His shirt collar was open. All the vitality was in the hazel-green eyes, which flashed with curiosity at the sight of Ella. For her it was the strangest thing, this almost visible life-force that streamed from him. It was like the radiant attack of a young god and she shrank back as though it might burn her.

  He hopped in awkwardly and hobbled over to the bed, wincing and smiling. Ella stood up, allowing him to sit down.

  ‘The police is after us. Ah’ve twisted ma foot,’ he said laughing.

  Cyrus stood with an amused grin on his face, arms folded. He introduced them.

  ‘Donny. Ella. Ella. Donny.’

  Donny nodded towards her, groaned and rolled over on the bed, then shot upright again holding his foot with both hands. He wrested his shoe off and pulled down the sock to inspect the damage. The ankle was slender, coltish and ended in a strong slim foot. He twisted it this way and that gingerly. There was already some swelling around the joint. Ella stared at the bony excrescence peeping from the sock. It reminded her of a horse’s hock or the bone spavin of a goat. She sat down suddenly on the bed like an unstrung puppet. Donny bent over to examine the injured foot. A strand of shining hair fell over his forehead in a question mark.

  ‘Look after your feet. First rule of a soldier.’ He winced as he moved the foot.

  ‘And dancers,’ she said. ‘I’m a dancer. We have to look after our feet too.’ He stared at her with interest for a moment. Then, still massaging his ankle, he turned to Cyrus:

  ‘Can I get out by the fire escape?’ He gestured with his head towards the window.

  ‘You can get out on to next door’s roof.’ Cyrus turned to Ella. ‘Run into your flat and see if Betty Bracelet is in the street.’ She looked bewildered.

  ‘Betty Bracelet. Lily Law. The police,’ he explained. She ran into her own flat and looked out through the window, then came back.

  ‘I can’t see any police.’

  ‘Good,’ said Donny. ‘Give us a hand.’

  Cyrus held his arm as he limped and hopped towards the window, holding his shoe in his hand. He scrambled out onto the roof:

  ‘See you later.’

  They watched him disappear over the rooftops.

  ‘Who is that?’ asked Ella.

  ‘Donny McLeod. I met him about a month ago.’ Cyrus mopped his nose with a tissue and gave a hoarse cough. ‘Do you know what “rolling a queer” means?’

  Ella shook her head. He raised his eyebrows and rolled his eyes at her ignorance.

  ‘Well, there are guys around Soho who pretend to give you the come-on. Then they get you on your own, beat you up and rob you. I brought Donny back here one night. I suspect he was planning something like that. But anyway as soon as we got back here we started chatting and he stayed for his supper. I think it was the piano that saved me. That and the bacon sandwiches. He had this menacing light in his eye until he spotted the piano. Then he asked me, “Can ye play that thing?”

  ‘I didn’t want to play. I thought if I turned my back to him he’d attack me. Then I thought, oh what the fuck. I lifted the lid and began to play some Chopin. I turned around and there was this look of horror on his face. He shoved me sideways off the stool and said, “I don’t know what sort of fingers you’ve got but mine are the one and ninepenny sort.” And he began to pick out some
boogie. So I said, “Oh, I can do that.” And I started to bang out a honky-tonk version of “When All the Saints …” You should have seen the grin on his face. You’ve cracked it, Cyrus, I thought. Not much chance of sex but at least you won’t end up a corpse. I offered him a joint but he likes booze. So we started popping open some beers.

  ‘“Wait here a second,” says Donny, and runs out into the Soho night. Ten minutes later he reappears with some drumsticks. Where the hell he got them I don’t know. I played and he beat out the rhythm with his drumsticks on the side of the sink and then on the top of the piano, on the bed, the floor and any other available surface. And we start up a bit of a session. Then one of the waiters comes up from the restaurant and says we’re disturbing the customers downstairs. So I tell Donny to keep it down a bit. And he goes mad. He bounces up and kicks the door shut in the man’s face: “Fuck them. I like din. I am a fucking roarer. I am someone who loves clamour,” he says. And he pushes me out of the way and starts to hammer the piano and sing at the top of his voice.

  ‘“Don’t do that,” I’m saying. “They’re my landlords. I’ll get thrown out.”

  ‘“I don’t give a fuck.” And he goes and puts his foot down on the loud pedal and goes on bellowing at the top of his voice. There’s something about him that’s making me laugh. “This is just what I’m like on a couple of beers,” he says. “Two whiskies and I go for the jugular. Two whiskies and Mr Puma appears.” And he leaps up and performs a little tap dance and sits down again. Anyway the end of it all is that we’re both screaming with laughter and he’s dancing around and singing some obscene song he learnt in the army as a boy soldier and I’m frying up bacon for bacon sandwiches.

  ‘“I was going to kill you,” he tells me, wiping runny butter from the corner of his mouth with the back of his wrist. “But seeing that you are a musician you were spared.” We’re both doubled up with laughter by now. I don’t know what’s going on. “I’m going to come up again and we can play some more,” he says. Then he gets all enthusiastic. “Get a drum kit,” he says.