Sheer Blue Bliss

by Lesley Glaister

  ‘Sit down.’

  He sits on a flimsy chair which she’s positioned in front of the Calor gas heater. ‘Your hair’s wet,’ she says. She picks up a towel from beside the sink. He’d thought it was a tea-towel, been drying dishes on it, can’t use that on his hair, clean towel in his bag but somehow he can’t speak or move. She lifts his wet ponytail and puts the towel round his shoulders. The gas heat gnaws his shins. ‘Lovely hair,’ she says. ‘Why cut it short when it’s so glorious? That’s what I say. I do go for all this let it be, let it all hang out whatsit and piercing, yes, ears and noses, I do like that. You got that? Now.’ She sloshes whisky into a cup and a glass, straight on top of the dregs of her wine. A fussiness rises in him but he takes the glass. ‘Skoal!’ she says. He stares at the gold fluid and the red wine beads still on the sides of the glass, lip smudges round the rim. When he drinks he tips the glass so that his lips don’t touch it.

  ‘Can I?’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘May I …’ She has moved behind him, he looks up at her face. They bloat or shrivel, old women, he’s noticed that and this one’s shrivelled. She’s grinning childishly, eyes bright in the leather face. ‘Comb it for you?’ He shrugs. ‘Then it’ll dry smooth.’ She rummages through a drawer then stands behind him. His shoulders are slumped but he can’t straighten them. She pulls out the rubber band, tearing some hairs at the nape of his neck, but he doesn’t shout or even flinch. She combs the ends first, holding each lock so that it doesn’t pull as she works out the snarls. Her breathing is loud with here and there a sigh. Little snappings of his hair. When she’s done the ends she starts at the top of his head and combs down, not gently, the teeth of the comb dragging the back of his scalp.

  He can’t think who combed his hair last. Can’t remember his mother touching it although she must have done. It was very short then, short as possible, so there wouldn’t have been much touching. Now he never has it cut. The tap drips, the gas heater pops, the comb in his hair is a faint swish. There is her breath and there is the rain on the roof and below it all, a deep irregular bass, is the rhythm of the sea.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s up with you, dear?’ Connie suggests. And he thinks, Why not? But then what? What could he say?

  ‘Nothing’s up.’ Tips another swallow of whisky into his mouth, feels the hot gold settling him. She tut-tuts and carries on combing, pulling the hair from round the sides, combing above his ears.

  ‘Beautiful hair,’ she says, ‘I haven’t combed another person’s hair for … for donkey’s years.’

  ‘Did you comb his hair?’

  She sucks in her breath, pauses for a long moment between strokes. Then, ‘We combed each other’s. It was a kind of … a kind of soothing. Do you find it soothing?’

  Tony says nothing but yes, that’s just what he feels, just temporarily, superficially, amazingly, soothed. He closes his eyes and feels the comb travelling through his hair, the tiny passage of each tooth against the shape of his skull. Patrick sat here, felt just this. ‘What was his hair like?’ Tony asks.

  Benson answers immediately as if she has been thinking of just that. ‘White the last years, and thinning on top. He never realised that, because it was on top and he couldn’t see. I never said, of course. Wavy hair. Black when he was young though already going white when I met him … he was a good deal older than me, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You know about him?’

  Tony feels an urge to laugh. Know about him? I know every fucking word he wrote. But he only nods.

  ‘Some kind of journalist?’ Connie pauses, the comb just above his ear, and then resumes.

  ‘Me … no.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Black like mine?’

  ‘No … quite a different type of hair. This rain! Yours is absolutely straight. Almost blue. Extraordinary that light in it. To paint it would be … yes, extraordinary. Paddy’s was coarser and not, to tell the truth, absolutely black, more very deep brown, red lights rather than blue. There, all done.’ She stands back.

  He wants to ask her to continue. Wants to be sitting by the heater having his hair combed for ever, just to hang there, safe and soothed and never have to face what’s next. She puts the comb on the table beside her dirty plate and he sees the long black hairs against the pale grain of the wood. The proximity of his own shed hairs and the sticky brown gravy, a bay leaf on the edge of the plate.

  ‘I’ll wash up,’ he says.

  ‘No need.’ But he stands and picks up the plate.

  ‘Delicious,’ she says, ‘if not a journalist, perhaps a chef?’

  He feels a crazy buzz of pleasure like a humming in his ribs.

  ‘Not eating?’ she says.

  And maybe that is it, what he needs, food inside him to weigh him down. Good wholesome food cooked with love. Love! The word pops in him like a bubble of acid. Wine, whisky, rain in his hair, smoke, adrenalin. All these things, no wonder he feels weird, his scalp tingling from all the combing.

  ‘Use my plate, no sense dirtying two.’

  He ignores that, turns on the tap, there is always a wait for the water, he’s learning that already, the ways of this place, a wait, a judder of pipework and then a fierce surge of water that splashes your front if you’re not careful and then slows to a reluctant trickle.

  ‘If you’d just tell me what you want …’

  He deflects the splash of water with the plate. Holds it under till the gravy is rinsed off. It’ll have to be wet. Can’t dry it with that tea-towel now it’s been near his hair. Can’t eat off a wet plate. He takes another from the cupboard, white painted with worn yellow flowers that look like specks of yolk. The food is no longer hot. He heaps it on the plate, stands by the sink with his back to her, shovelling it into his mouth. It’s great, even luke-warm. Maybe he should have been a chef. He can just see his reflection in the steamy window. The light shining blue on his hair just like she said, what did she say? Extraordinary to paint. The idea gets to him, a new, big idea. He swallows, says nothing until the plate is empty and his belly full. He washes the plate, aware of her uneasy presence behind him. He’s better now, back in control. Why is she hovering there behind him? What does she want of him? To comb his hair, to interrogate him? To think she’s in control?

  ‘You do have something I want,’ he says.

  ‘Well, of course I do. Else why would you be here?’

  He turns. There is an expression of interest on her face. An at-last-we’re-getting-to-it kind of expression. She sits down and takes a sip of whisky from the teacup which has no handle.

  ‘I want …’ he begins. She raises her hand and its shadow catches his eye, a soft crab sliding sideways on the table. ‘I want the elixirs.’

  ‘Aaaah.’ She smiles. ‘I should have guessed. People used to come … but not for years. I’d almost forgotten.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You’ve been reading Paddy’s book. You must realise he was … prone to exaggeration.’ Her smile is almost pitying. She will not dare to tell him the Seven Steps is a lie. She can’t.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning don’t believe all you read.’

  Time swings loose. Again he’s slipping. Oh Christ he needs a shower, his bed. Thinks longingly of his flat, Donna next door, his own bed-sheets so starchy tight. That life … it seems almost together now. But then, living that life then had seemed like nothing, just a waiting time, not a real life at all. Is there any way back?

  ‘Meaning?’ He imagines raising his fist, thumping the table, screaming it into her face – meaning? She is not frightened. She should be fucking frightened. If she knew. The girl he didn’t mean to kill that he did kill, served time for. Served time, time the master. There was no intention. No guilt on that score. But the anger came and Christ, she was so soft, her voice in his ear, her skin silkier than silk, her armpit – his index finger slipping under her arm and the surprise of soft hair there, soft and damp where women sho
uld be shaved. Somehow that got to him, the sort of trust of it, giving him her body as it was, no make-up, perfume, a childish smell of soap, baby powder or something like. Tenderness and the backlash. How it is. Tenderness is danger. It has to be whores, the rougher the better but he can’t trust them to be clean. Who could trust a whore? So he’s stuck. Tenderness is the danger, oh yes that eruption of anger that screws his fists, his gut, floods his mouth with the taste of metal, that blinds him.

  ‘Shall we have a cup of tea?’ Benson says.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Simply that he was far from perfecting …’

  ‘But he got some way?’

  ‘If you read you know …’

  ‘And what … where are they … what there is?’

  ‘Went with him.’ He watches her run the horny edge of her thumbnail along the grain of the wooden table. He sits down on the chair that is frail as her bones, that feels like it will snap under his weight.

  ‘With him where?’

  ‘Wherever he went.’

  ‘He went on the day I was born.’ He waits but she says nothing. She is so fucking tiny, her head about the size of a grapefruit. ‘So you don’t have anything?’

  ‘If I did?’

  ‘I would ask you to give them to me. I need …’

  ‘Need?’

  ‘I would ask you.’

  ‘And do you suppose I would give?’

  He stares at her. I’d fucking take them, he says with his eyes but he can’t stare her out, those bright eyes, maybe they can’t see, maybe he’s out of focus to her. Maybe to himself he is out of focus. It’s sinking in that he has come to the end of the trail, lost the scent. Needs to think, to get this sorted in his head, what then? what now? From behind the table Patrick smirks. The portrait of Patrick that she painted, this woman, famous painter. If this is famous! Living like this in a sink hole. Which he will leave. Leave her, leave her to rot and crumble and fall through the floor. Done nothing wrong, he can leave now. Stop this.

  Must get clear. For years there’s been the plan, dream, trust – that is the worst of it – that he will find the elixirs, that in this way Patrick will save him from himself. But no. Patrick fucked off out of it and took whatever there was with him. So now what? Nothing. Nothing to keep him, nothing to … head for. He loved Patrick. Patrick has let him down. Smirking down there in the shadow.

  ‘Would you carry him up for me?’ Benson has followed his eyes. ‘Only I’d like to get him settled back.’

  He shrugs: Gets up. ‘OK.’ Lifts the painting, averting his eyes from Patrick’s that surely are taking the piss.

  ‘I’ll go up first and switch on the lamp,’ she says. ‘No big light up there.’ She climbs up the ladder, kind of like a child, putting both feet carefully on each rung. He waits at the bottom looking at her stupid shoes, like kids’ party shoes, watching those thin shins that disappear inside a green dress, thinking once he must have watched those legs and lusted. Thinking very dully. No anger, that is good, odd, but good, no anger no, just a kind of letdown, like a scaffolding’s gone.

  The light comes on up there and he goes up after her. Hangs the painting on the hook she indicates.

  ‘Welcome back, darling,’ she says. The light is just a pool on the floor so Patrick still looks shadowy. Shady. Tony almost trips on something.

  ‘Mind,’ Connie snaps.

  He looks down at the brown-paper parcel, an actual brown-paper parcel tied with string. ‘Paints,’ she says, ‘new paints.’

  It reminds him.

  ‘Would you paint me?’ For maybe that is it. Yes, that’s it. She paints him, immortalises him in the way Patrick is immortalised. The portraits can hang side by side. Someone would pay a lot of money for a new portrait by Constance Benson. A portrait of Tony. Next exhibition there he’d be, at the view, up there in the light, never mind shut out in the cold and the rain. He’d be up there, he’d be someone, someone among all the Patricks. It’s as if all the particles of him jump together at the thought. Yes, that’s it. And the elixirs, she could be lying about the elixirs for all he knows but if he sticks around … Who knows? Maybe the truth will out.

  ‘No,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘No.’

  A long pause. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying no.’ The light shines up from the floor so that her face is a dark mess of angled shadows, lines, eyes gone.

  ‘No?’

  ‘I don’t paint, dear. Not for a long time.’

  ‘You do paint. These are paints.’ He kicks the brown-paper parcel.

  ‘I buy paints because I love paints. I can’t not buy them, all the colours. But I don’t paint. I’m going down.’

  Tony watches her. His hands hang by his sides, loose fists that could beat the shit out of her no trouble, but he lets her go, the thin wisps of the top of her head disappearing last. When she’s gone he turns to look at Patrick. It’s only paint on a flat canvas but his head seems to turn slightly, can’t, and the eyes seem to blink. Is that a wink? No. Come on, Tony, get a grip. She says no. But nevertheless she will paint him. That is the new idea. He will stick around and she will paint him and maybe the elixirs will come to light, the truth will come to light.

  He kneels and unties the string, unfolds the brown paper. In a wooden box are tubes and tubes of paint. In the dim light he holds them close to his eyes: cadmium yellow, ultramarine, veridian. He presses between his finger and thumb, unscrews the lid of one tube and squeezes. The colour that comes out looks blackish in the poor light, a worm of black on his hand, an oily rich smell. He rubs it round his palm, a wet dark hollow. The paint on his hand is fine at first but then it starts to feel like mud or shit. It’s dirt and he needs to wash it off, quick, quick, to get that feeling off his skin. He goes down the ladder and to the sink.

  ‘You been messing with my paints?’ she says, she’s sitting at the table swigging whisky. It makes a kind of creaky gulp as it passes down her throat. He turns on the tap. ‘You won’t get it off with water.’

  ‘What then?’ She takes her time, wipes her mouth on the back of her hand. He splays out his own fingers, can’t bear the sticky feel of them pressing together. ‘What?’

  ‘Turps, under the sink.’

  It makes him almost want to get rid of his hand, the feel of that paint clinging. He pulls back the bit of raggedy curtain, soggy cardboard cartons and cylinders of Dreft, Ajax, Flash, a bad damp smell of clean gone wrong. But there is a plastic bottle of turps, he pulls it out, unscrews it and splashes some on his palm, rubs his hands together so the paint thins to a stinking runny brown. He puts his hands under the cold water, squirts Squeezy on them, making shit-coloured suds in the sink.

  ‘Raw sienna,’ she remarks.

  He rubs and rubs in the water that feels icy until the stain has gone, until his hands are raw and red.

  ‘Finished?’ she says.

  Don’t laugh at me. Tony sits down opposite her, reaches for the whisky, pours himself a drop, just a drop. Tosses it down his throat without touching the glass to his lips. Waits for her to say more but she says nothing, stares into her cup with a far-away kind of smile, makes some awful clicking swallowing sounds.

  ‘I want you to paint me,’ he says. A clear and reasonable enough request. After a pause he even adds, ‘Please.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Oh no. No question of that.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he says, staring at her face wondering does she, does she understand? ‘I’m not asking, as such.’ He pauses. ‘I’m telling.

  She snorts. ‘Let me get this straight. You, you are telling me to paint you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There is a long silence. Not silence of course, it rarely is, there are all the sounds of the sea and sky and room and the two living bodies inside it. But still, the not speaking has a resonance all of its own.

  ‘And I am saying no.’

  He rubs his cold hands on his thighs. He shrugs, smooths his
hair back, feeling the blue light in it crackle against his hand. It’s nearly dry now. He picks the rubber band, all stuck with broken-off hairs off the table, and snaps it on his hair.

  ‘We’ll start tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m off to bed,’ she says.

  ‘And we’ll start tomorrow at … nine?’

  She goes to the sink, picks a foul discoloured toothbrush from the windowsill and fishes in the drawer for some toothpaste. She puts a finger in her mouth and flips out her dentures. He shudders. She runs the tap, scrubs at the pink gums and ivory teeth and plops the whole denture in a cup with a fizzing tablet. She scrubs the same toothbrush round in her mouth and spits in the sink. She lights the gas under the kettle again then she goes out of the door letting in a fresh blast of rainy air. While she’s gone he listens to the fizzing of the dissolving tablet, the dripping of the tap, the racing of water approaching the boil, the far-off rush of the toilet flushing. She comes back in acting like he’s not there which he fucking is. She stoops down and from under the sink, brings out a pink hot-water bottle. She fills it from the kettle and, holding it against her chest, goes to the bottom of the ladder.

  ‘I’m sleeping up there,’ Tony says.

  She opens her mouth at him, no teeth, her little face folded even smaller now, her mouth a ragged O. She looks at him for a moment, but says nothing, turns and shuffles off into the bedroom. The door closes behind her with a hard click.

  ‘Good-night,’ he calls. But he doesn’t climb the ladder. He opens the outside door and steps out, rubbing his cold hands on his jeans and looking at the rips in the cloud through which the stars sing, icy-clean and unimaginably far away.

  SIX

  The bed is damp, of course it is, not slept in since … Connie hates to come into this room. The memory of Patrick, not the painted Patrick but the real physical Patrick, the flesh and the bones, is so strong in here that it makes her cold. Not ordinary cold, but as if the air around her clings wetly, condenses on her warm live flesh and trickles down. Stop it. The bulb is dead and she stumbles to the dressing-table and wrenches at the sticking drawer, pulls out a damp tangle of woollen underwear, frowsty with her own smell. She fumbles at her clothes, takes some off, pulls on the long-johns and a cardigan, some socks that are his woollen socks knitted by Sacha and still good. A sudden memory of Sacha asleep in the conservatory, sun on her lined face, knitting dangling from her lap. Hard in the darkness to dress but she’s not having that door open with him out there.