by Rodney Hall
She finishes satisfying herself and falls back as the wave ebbs. Drowsiness tempts the warm weight of her limbs.
‘I so see what I see in you!’ he murmurs. Her languor impresses him as more intensely flesh than flesh. ‘You know . . . we never actually broke up, did we?’
‘We were never actually together.’
He smiles inwardly because there is always some comfort in the truth.
Time for action. Feeling masterful and businesslike Ryan takes a brief shower. Returning so she can watch him dry himself. He selects a pair of designer underpants (LUNCH brand) and snaps them on. Roused by his vanity she remains detached. Her gaze slides down to where the waistband stretches tight, a hollow on either side of the abdominal ridge, her pleasure entirely aesthetic. An anatomy book would tell her as much.
‘Is that the look you give your lover?’
‘Only you can know.’
He glitters at her and reaches for his jeans, incidentally checking the mirror to observe how they sheath his legs. Bulking against the fabric. Clipping the belt.
‘Why am I not surprised?’ she remarks ambiguously and, by way of apology, reaches out to pull him back down on the bed. She unbuckles the buckle he just did up.
They fill each other’s eyes. Oh yes, she knows how to get her pleasure on his body. The fact that he always comes up to the mark confirms some secret at the heart of his vanity. She sees this with the fleeting suspicion that it diminishes him. He lies, bare-chested, still in his jeans, arms stretched above his head. He makes a net of fingers for cradling his skull. Even his inner arm is tanned. He produces biceps for her to possess should she be tempted. She is. But she doesn’t.
‘Whoever designed you,’ she suggests, aware of tweaking a tender little doubt, ‘put too much into the finish . . . I mean, what can be done with you? There’s no room for anyone else.’
Tactfully Ryan chooses to interpret this in terms of his profession.
‘It’s a dog eat dog industry,’ he concedes. ‘You’ve no idea what I went through, making it to here. Nor what I’m prepared to do.’
‘To get where you want to go?’
‘Exactly,’ he says. And laughter ripples around his torso. How could he be displeased with her, particularly as she now straddles him to emphasize the justice of her objection? Long hair curtains her face, the tips brushing his chest with tantalizing delicacy.
‘So much promise,’ she purrs provocatively.
The understanding between them is complete.
Music now occupies the entire room.
‘I can’t imagine,’ he offers frankly, ‘how tough life is for you.’
She does not deny it. He pays tribute to her predicament and this has to be enough.
Long minutes of breathing later he remarks admiringly: ‘You’ve changed, you know.’
She slides the zip open and reaches in to insert her finger under the LUNCH waistband.
She asks, ‘Can you keep a secret?’ but, when it comes to the point, offers nothing.
The departmental medics are back and standing behind Adam on either side. They peer over his shoulder at the bright unguarded screen. Check. Spying begins at home. And all too soon his locked-in limbs are being swung on end for laying out along the treatment table.
‘Try to go limp, mate,’ the physio suggests, ‘while I ease these hamstrings for you.’
‘I’ve still got. Hamstrings!’
‘Looks like you’re making progress with that equipment, too.’
‘But. Ar. Way short of. A stalker.’
Vanessa extracts herself. She disapproves of patients who presume to play hard ball—she having senior rank—because stalking is not permissible as the subject of a joke . . . even a joke at his own expense. She leaves him to Josh and conducts the wife across to the window seat, where she produces a survey form and makes ready to tick a few boxes.
‘So, what about sex?’ she asks outright, provoked into challenging Adam who can overhear.
‘What about it?’ Bridget replies flatly. She has no intention of being humiliated. Nor is this the army’s business. She and Adam were finished years ago. They had difficulties long before he got himself injured. She turns away and gazes out through the window, eyes smarting. The street lies empty and expectant. She lets her attention rest on the green recesses of the park. Her phone rings. It’s Ryan. She conceals the screen and stands up.
‘I beg your pardon,’ she says.
The professionals again meet one another’s agreement. The half-smile they exchange is that excluding species of approval peculiar to those with knowledge they may offer for the benefit of the uninformed—or not.
Yao steps down from a tram at the port. He never tires of the vast shifting shapeless bay, its headlands so remote and unremarkable they are beyond the reach of sight. Time—all of itself—rejuvenates him. As expressed in his elastic step. And he has two hours off. The shoreless expanse glitters with sun shards. He heads along a path that leads between waterfront properties where stiff trees tremble at the force of the wind. Spun telegraph wires bow and bend. House doors slam and casements shudder against the buffeting gale. Gardens swirl in a wild play of glinting foliage, twigs tossing and tendrils streaming. Pedestrians make their way lopsided, the body a buttress, hair ruffled and hats flying off. Skirts dance and loose clothes are moulded to torsos. The sheets of a dismembered newspaper leap to life as gigantic butterflies—opening out and collapsing shut—wind combs the beach grass and sends little balls of fibre skittering across the bitumen. Flags strain at flagpoles where frayed threads of colour finger the escaping sky. Loose lids flap open. Restless wavelets kick at the bollards along the marina. Boats list and rock, ropes slatting against masts. The panorama of water seethes with whiteheads. He slips his shoes off and walks on crushed shells. Responsibilities sting his skin.
I am lonely, Yao admits. Lucky, but lonely.
On the journey home he comes to a decision. He decides, yes, at last, exactly what to do. He walks right past his own front gate—permanently held open by an overgrowth of weeds—to climb the rockery steps next door. No dream was ever more ghostly or detached or filled with apprehension than this reality. Once he reaches the tiny verandah he can see it has been tacked on. The original porch sports panels of coloured glass flanking the door and a tiled floor. Though slightly mouldy and too small to impress, it’s quaint. He knocks.
Bridget, as she opens the door, steps back, as shocked as she is unsurprised. So strange, this simple face to face event, alive with guilty glimmers and butting shadows. Who knows how such invitations are triggered? Shocked because she feels shame (without cause) at the proximity of his body. How is that just? They bear the spoken and the unspoken pain of combatants on the same battlefield, burnt by the same radiance. Already emergency sirens wail soundlessly and there is a quickening of the space between them.
‘Hullo?’ she enquires, on guard.
‘Soon my little girl needs picking up from school,’ Yao explains at a tangent—to bypass the rush of so much else crowding his mind—before homing in on the sentence he has rehearsed. ‘I’ve seen him up here.’ That’s it. The sentence about Adam. Yao’s gamble has begun. And, being left no choice but to continue, he continues. ‘So I thought I’d ask . . . well, does he ever want to leave?’ When this comes out sounding wrong he glances away in confusion, needing to escape, his resolve undermined by a suspicion that mentioning Adam might be nothing more than an alibi! Deceit! But courage and commonsense come to the rescue. ‘Thing is, there’s time on my hands now Linda’s settled.’
Bridget takes up the name: ‘Linda?’
She prolongs the moment to give herself time. She must fix this neighbour in mind while she has the chance: his wiry hair and slender sinewy hands. And her radar gets busy mapping the topography beneath his clothes.
‘Linda, yes,’ he agrees in a voice deeper than
expected, like a singer gathering to his lungs the power to rise above an orchestra. This is easier. ‘Linda looks forward to getting back home so she can tell me about school.’
‘She’s very cute.’
‘She’s very serious.’
Yao stands in the porch, now unaccountably diminished and stranded, his sandy shoes down-at-heel and his shy smile dipping to linger on the patterned tiles. All in an instant she can imagine his whole life as a kaleidoscope of bits and scraps: parades, firecrackers, paper dragons, a faulty list of Chinese year signs, communism, Chairman Mao, embroidered silk, cheap cigarettes and a popular dating show on television.
She pulls herself together with an effort.
‘So, Yao, what can I . . . ?’—and though this is the first time she has addressed him directly his name slips out with no trouble at all—‘what can we do for you?’
Luckily Adam himself speaks from within the house to preserve the taboos that seem threatened.
‘Who is it? Ar. Sweetheart?’
‘Only Yao next door.’
‘Ask him. In.’
The discreet whirr of the Contraption can be heard. Yao’s eyes meet hers as she turns aside for him to step past her. Already, somehow, she and he are equals: no one and no one. The tiny breeze of movement between them starts goosebumps standing up along his bare forearm.
Adam on his feet, slightly off plumb and magnificent as a monument, elevates an open hand to indicate the vacant chair.
Yao hesitates.
‘Are you in pain, mate?’ he asks.
And Bridget’s policy of avoiding the obvious suffers a loss.
‘Life’s what. It is. Because the alternative’s. Probably worse.’
‘I suppose.’
‘The army medics. Keep loose bits. From falling off!’
‘And you have your wife as well,’ Yao concedes.
She hears how gently and lucidly he seizes on this allowable compliment.
‘And yours? Ar. Your partner?’ Adam asks candidly while lowering himself on to the couch. ‘We haven’t. Seen her.’
‘Linda’s mother’s not here.’
This is the very thing Bridget needs to have clarified—although none of her business—before she can begin to allay a creeping sensation of shame. Not here, he says. And yet she senses his hurt. And this is what prevents her from inviting more details or coming to the point too soon. She can see how her furniture hedges him in. The future will need to be nursed into flame.
‘That house of yours,’ she offers neutrally, ‘has stood empty for such a long time.’
Yao lets this pass. ‘I couldn’t help noticing you,’ he persists with another evasion.
Adam grimaces at his equipment and explains, ‘I got into a. Fight with a. Bigger guy.’
Yao nods agreeably, as if frightful wounds are to be expected among friends, before coming up to the mark, at last: ‘I called over to offer a suggestion.’ And it seems that this new voice requires him to escape from the chair. He leaps to his feet. ‘Have you thought of a ramp?’
Nothing could be more queer or absurd.
‘Why?’ Bridget shrieks, her sense of propriety baulking at so large a presumption.
‘Ar. Why?’ Adam agrees.
The curious intimacy knotting itself around them begins unravelling to reveal something simple, alien and banal.
‘A ramp?’ Bridget repeats.
‘So he can get out into the street,’ Yao explains. ‘I reckon a ramp’s pretty easy. One slope down that way, see?’—with a flat hand he models the idea—‘One slope back this way. I’ve got the tools. I could build that.’
Adam chokes on the foreign idea.
‘Seems like a. Hell of a. Lot of work and. Expense.’
‘Nope. It’s a pretty straightforward job. You provide the materials and I can look after the rest. Think about it.’
They all do.
‘But we only just. Met.’
‘That’s what makes it okay.’
Bridget, nevertheless, pursues the option of escaping involvement. ‘We don’t know you,’ she objects weakly.
Yao shrugs. ‘You do now.’
She trembles. And defends herself with a warning: ‘I’m not sure we can afford to pay for it, anyway.’ Perhaps no one has ever misunderstood her so completely.
‘I don’t want to be paid.’
As if, finally, Bridget hears the murmur in her heart, she collects her wits. She plays her next card casually.
‘Well, if it’s possible . . .’
‘Of course it’s possible, I’ve made a plan.’
She turns Adam’s way now she feels her eyes will no longer betray something unwanted: ‘You’d jump at it, wouldn’t you?’
He decides: ‘It sounds like. A cool idea.’
The decision has been made. The men relax. And she relaxes. With everything changed, Yao makes ready to leave.
‘I know of an old cement-mixer for hire—though getting it going might risk another explosion!’
They all laugh into the terror.
Adam lets himself drift as he imagines the ramp. Causes and consequences blur and mutate. Yao has gone. Sudden alterations defy logic. The Contraption proves steady as a rock when, half awake while standing up, he loses his balance. The world recedes to a fluid narrative which fills him with nostalgia. He experiments with intervention: dreamed people in among dreamed objects can be changed without lessening their hold. Conscious and subconscious merge. The inert mind shapes substance and illusion differently. Fascinated by bridging the disconnection. With practice maybe he will one day sustain the trick long enough to reach an understanding. Is this (home) what he longed for while armed men hunted him out there in the Iraqi desert? The dreaming mind does not strictly revisit the past, remaking it with jumps and transferences. He knows that. Thing is, whether or not one can intervene.
Forcing panic back into the nightmare where it belongs, Adam lets the memories go. Better. He never had the habit of thinking much. Enough to review his lucky survival. Give thanks for the ordinary stuff. Survival itself confers meaning, like the planetary division of day from night. He is surrounded. His eyes and ears of a threatened species. Bits of his mind break loose, each carrying off a part of what he’s looking at. Steady on. I’m the lucky one who’s lived to tell the tale. I know what the afterlife looks like. Made objective he feels better. He feels good and the roll of barbed-wire pains loosens. He tries a pinch of philosophy: maybe the point of an ending is to give shape to the beginning and middle.
Asleep and awake, outlasting the hour, the night, a challenging week. He eats, he stops eating. Bridget is back. Bridget is gone. Bridget is back again. He fills the long hours of survival tapping at the keyboard with material for his blog. The past reclaimed through self-interrogation. From this perspective, propped in safety, even his enlistment takes on sharp outlines, hovering at the fringe of delirium. Snapshots of highlights he wants to have back. Trying the uniform on, buckles and straps—ash-green fatigues and cloth-covered helmet—emerging as a fabled creature. Himself in an aliens movie. How about that! His whole being projected toward the moment when the order comes to strike. This power I want and have wanted since the beginning. The guy-world is a blast. On patrol in the dangerous street. Guarding one another’s backs. Not needing to say much. Just now and then a quip of some kind. Balance. Eyes watching from under helmet rims: sideways indications, assent, warnings. Walking as a new mode of locomotion, massively weighty. Like the other boys who can be relied on. Negative space contracts to a pinpoint. Alive to the present as never before. Night-time outlines in the fluoro luridness of magnesium flares. The thunder of choppers batting back and forth. Reiterations of abandonment. A swarm of bold blows. The open ground itself uncertain, giving way when it ought to be firm. Out among blank-faced locals—each one a suspect. Even the children are daring e
nough to confront the giant with his weapon ready, unaware it’s only the guy from the café round the corner. A waiting motor ticks over. And next instant he trips and plunges into the abyss of a crisis . . . an agony of blue sky. Trash skitters across the wasteland, dancing from one pile of rubble to another. Temperature: fifty and above. The Moqtada advance, threading among the smoky ruins of a hotel, with body armour strapped on and each head wrapped in a black halo of rage. But, believe me, they’ll meet their match in us. We’re proud of the battalion’s good name. Contact. Sudden rounds ping off the corners. Concrete chips spin and snick through the air. Whoa! Is this ever going to let up! Taking cover while emptying half a magazine in reply. These lunatics don’t fool around. Shit! Lethal fucking shit! Bullets combing the length of the potholed lane. We volley off a reply. They had it coming, the dangerous crazies. Learn some fear, fuck you! Others coming. Shit. All hell breaks loose. What a party! Heavy guns in the distance grunting. Answered by some close-up installation. The ground shudders. Breath-cutting drifts of cordite let loose. The locals go crazy. Young guys armed with sticks come charging down the street. The idiots take no notice of the rattle of gunfire. Sticks! And they’re gone. Noise and smut choke the sky. A mortar bomb lobbing. With a double crash of detonations another chunk of hotel roof collapses. Tonnes of rubble slump. There were enemy sharp-shooters hidden under that. Did they get out in time? Going which way? Can’t see a fucking thing. Wind strong in the wrong direction. Oblong sky a blanket of crap. Glimpses of a town, empty walls broken, shadows, ramshackle openings, passageways, standing power poles and stairs leading up into nowhere, rooms—rooms seen into with no windows, no doors and no roofs—the total emptiness of sand-coloured wreckage laid bare under jagged sunlight. A broken palm tree sinks in the crater of its own shadow. Hot and abandoned. Nothing happens. Back on the attack the vehicle starts moving again and not a moment too soon. A sudden burst of speed. Every man jack communicates through the pores of his skin, nerves strung out and tuned to screaming pitch. Nobby slams on the brakes. Raised dust stands in the air. Hot. Hot. But now, at last, there’s nothing left. Followed by relief enough to cry out. The others glare around, trying to believe. Eyes full of shock because I can’t help laughing like a donkey.