On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  Images are no more reliable than script, Martine thought. I know the ring could mean much or little. When he grinned, his teeth were gappy. The ripple in his hair had a sandy glint, tucked behind his ear now, growing longer. She hadn’t known until the ring flash he was married. A month or two, apparently. Something in her thudded down a shaft. He had no children to suffer, or so she hoped.

  Together they bypassed Martine’s habitual Luigi’s for some large, 1960s bland hotel. Its lounge was where besuited, commission-only salespeople went to look salaried, talking the sales spiel talk. She couldn’t help her usual evangelising for LIPSS.

  ‘It’s the perfect way of improving classroom conversation.’ Her big-thumbed hands chopped air. ‘It’s real action research for real practising teachers.’

  Charlie argued quietly but forcefully for the social mediation of English texts in multi-cultural classrooms. His wave wouldn’t stay behind his ear and he kept winding it back. She felt odd, feverish. She thought, What are the two of us saying, what are we hearing from each other? Not just what we’re saying.

  She got up. He got up and clamped her hand to the table. He grabbed their cups of coffee and swaggered off, stealing them, bold as brass, out into the mild spring day. She was flustered by his grip but even more when it went. She found herself pursuing him down the pavement.

  On a bench in the nearby square she reclaimed her cup, which he’d put down. It slopped as she took a gulp of filthy coffee.

  Now he was speaking about some project called Erasmus. ‘It’s a university pilot. We’re still planning and talking, but.’

  A hand’s breadth on the bench away from her, he was behaving as if nothing was happening. The hand of the breadth was Charlie’s, broad, coarse-pored, flecked with hairs like a dune with grasses. Erasmus was an initiative to link English students with those from other countries: Martine took that much in.

  Charlie wasn’t niggling her that day. Maybe he’d never intended to, and maybe nothing would happen. Keep looking about the square, she told herself. She looked about distractedly and decided, Nature doesn’t belong in London: London’s a place for buildings and people and machines. There was budburst into flower on the trees. Her inner voice word-played out a warning, Nip it in the bud.

  She spouted on, ‘For the moment the teachers are just baseline calculating the teacher: pupil talk ratios,’ advertising LIPSS again.

  Talk, talk, talk. It was their subject and their medium, yet she couldn’t even focus on Charlie’s fervour for it across whole cultures and continents.

  Her mind escaped to Mohan, the way he’d talked of talk from far away. ‘I said to tatta is Upeksha in nirvana. He said in her opinion.’

  His words were always processed through hearsay, translation, editing, even censorship for all she knew. Media more distancing than a slab of hand on a strut.

  Two people startled a bird from the path, a black man and a white, runners in bright Lycra.

  Phil and Matthias surfaced in her head, shaded with sadness. ‘There’s a friend I miss. He’s changed.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that. But that’s about your friend, now,’ Charlie said, adding, without missing a beat, ‘not so much about you.’

  Martine’s heart sped. ‘Whereas shop talk is?’

  ‘Well you’re one for this work now, aren’t you? You mostly care about that. We both mostly care about that.’

  He didn’t say they were passionate about it, but the p word sat between them, with his hand.

  She grabbed their cups and walked away. She found herself at a tree-stump. She put the cups on the blank face of the stump, giggling in a way she never did. Beneath their circles placed like eyes, she veed the spoons for a mouth. He was close behind her, scrabbling in leaf litter. She smelt the odour of flesh as an arm wound round her, offering a cigarette stub for a nose. She stopped giggling, suddenly. They left their artwork and circuited the square, and the traffic circuited them. They walked round twice, in silence. Then they returned to work.

  She wrote to Mohan, ‘Are you all right? What can I do for you? Your letters seem much shorter.’

  Straining to help him. ‘Shorter’ seemed more tactful than ‘rude’ or ‘unengaged’.

  Now if she and Charlie met, they talked or argued about work, nothing else. And Charlie was seconded to her team.

  13 The object

  Friday 8 February 2013

  The object of Martine’s decision slips into fencing breeches, Hi-Tech shoes and padded jacket and picks up mask and gloves, shuffling down to the gym hall, where they’re allowed to practise. In the lodestar of all animes Sailor Moon has sword fights too, with Prince Endymion and many others. A fencing bout always brings out bravado, if not bravery: it’s good to have somewhere to stay soon, but it’s still an unknown woman, an unknown place.

  The object’s relieved family has emailed, full of obvious tips for behaviour. ‘Take her a present. Take an interest in her. Come to table when she says it’s time to. And of course never go out unless she’s with you.’

  The last is because of Black Sheep Shit. In fact, these days every bit of advice is because of Black Sheep Shit. BSS was his own boy, with his own style and ways, and for two years now he’s been and gone. Parental fears are stressful. Stupid bastards, to believe that keeping his siblings boring will stop them vanishing too.

  An email has gone back to them: ‘Whatever. Lots of love.’

  Fencing is a help. The cut and thrust get the frustration out, and the fencing terms are soothing when you get anxious. But also, when you feel that you don’t belong they make you feel that you do. They’re a cipher, known to a privileged few.

  The opponent today is Dietrich, slight, fair, rather pasty-looking.

  He hisses in English, before they draw their masks on, ‘You are shy and horrible.’

  Foil salutes are exchanged, and their feet squeak on the piste. The tinny engagement and disengagement of weapons, termed in the sport a conversation; the occasional grunt, shouts from the referee. The jargon repeats itself in the object’s head. Attaque, parry, balestra, counter-attack with a glissade, parry, riposte. This is just a knockabout, as the English call it, but for thirty minutes or so, the combatants share something.

  Afterwards, drawing off their masks, Dietrich recants, explaining surprisingly, ‘I mean, shy and horrible like me.’

  The object retreats to a private space, feeling a bit less beleaguered. The gloves come off, and the neon bracelet, threaded with its keys and feathers, goes swiftly back on the smoky wrist. Most of the keys are mortice keys, clunky and dramatic, a style statement, but one, a little padlock key, belonged to BS Shit. It’s a recent discovery that no one else even knows that the object has. It fits BS’s gym locker, back home.

  * * *

  Martine

  No balls continued

  1986

  In June 1986, Martine was called to a LIPSS school in Hackney that Charlie had just visited.

  ‘He may be charming, but that man thinks he knows everything,’ the headteacher complained.

  As Martine left through the playground, Charlie walked out of a bike shed by the gate.

  ‘You’re rubbing people up the wrong way.’ Martine had just ambushed herself into silly thoughts of touch and texture.

  She explained things to him as gently as she could, making some professional suggestions with dry humour. He looked at her as if her advice was odd.

  ‘We can all learn, now,’ he said. ‘You can even learn to like me, if we practise.’

  Without warning he was moving, manoeuvring her into the cliché of the bike shed, tugging at her shirt collar, fumbling her towards him, and she saw his mouth looming, puckering absurdly, presumably moving to kiss her, and beat him off. She stalked away, her heart pile-driving her chest.

  ‘Dear Miss Martine

  No I do not like the stamp. It looks like two things on fire the comet and the spacecraft. Jayamal is reading layers of gases surrounding the compacted nucleus of Halley’s comet co
nsisting of rubble pile but I do not understand. You say I am interested in minerals. I am not.

  ‘My question is come. I will try and find you a husband.

  ‘Jayamal said she must not take an Air Lanka Tristar L-1011 jet. Or she must look in the hold and if she sees any crates of vegetables they might be hiding something so she should get off and run away then row a boat then take a bus then take a tuk-tuk instead. Tatta said Jayamal stop that. I do not understand. A jet is best.

  ‘An elephant got into a village near. It did not kill any farmers.

  ‘My letters are not short. I am writing as much as I can.

  Mohan’

  The letter confirmed Martine’s doubts about visuals, since Mohan had spurned her stamp of Halley’s comet – not to mention her talk of minerals, a topic she thought he’d raised. And his demand that she come to Sri Lanka sounded bossy, not needy at all.

  Just for a while, what with Charlie, it suited her to believe that. She’d booked the Nile and the pyramids, a trip with Ali and Conrad. She’d done longer journeys before – South America with boyfriend Lucho, New York with boyfriend Patrick, Australia for a conference, beside her holidays in Europe – but she told herself now, I can’t go further than Egypt: I need to be closer to cope with Charlie. She ignored a smaller voice: If only to distract yourself maybe you should go further, make yourself remote from Charlie, see the boy.

  So she told Mohan, ‘You know I’d love to visit you. But it’s a long, long way, and very, very expensive.’

  There was a guest lecture by Gunther Kress, the rising star on social semiotics, just flown in from Sydney. Afterwards, a group of colleagues hosted him at a restaurant. Charlie was in the group.

  Since the bike-shed episode Martine had kept busy not thinking about it, not replaying it differently. He sat across from her. His square head, the hair by now pulled back into a ponytail, exaggerated the fleshiness of his face. She couldn’t miss its male-female quality. His big mouth working fast, Charlie demolished a noisette of lamb on aubergine purée. He started to lyricise to Kress about language as ideology. His foot knocked against Martine’s, she assumed accidentally, but for a long second, unabashedly, he stared at her. She went hot. She sidled her fork under the table. She ploughed his thigh with the tines. He snorted with laughter, throwing back his head, startling the restaurant. Then he went on chatting, ignoring her again.

  At first glance, Charlie was not what she wanted. Any new lover should be more exotic: someone remote from what she was, someone with stories from other worlds or a taker of risks she’d never take. Someone to oppose her, not necessarily complementary: someone who could be the other half she couldn’t be. On the far side from her female. I can’t help it, she thought helplessly: I’m an extremist, a romantic.

  She’d never been with a married man before. She thought, Maybe as a lover he’ll know things I don’t: he seems to with so much else. Whenever this occurred to her she got a frisson of something. Not exactly fear. Married life was another culture, far away – which maybe made him exotic after all.

  Meanwhile in the letters, Mohan was full of fear – for Jonas, for Astrid, for their unborn baby, at his own dreams – yet still didn’t spell it out for her. Apparently, his yearning tone had gone. ‘My question is will you leave your brother because he will have a baby. Do not leave your brother. The lady Astrid will hurt. It is suffering. Anupama says that Buddha says all life is suffering.

  ‘Tell the lady Astrid not to clean the cobwebs. It is bad.

  ‘You are doing very boring things in the college. Anupama does also. She roasts the spices cooks cleans picks the vegetables fetches water does the washing feeds the chickens fetches firewood. I do not understand a man helping you. My question is does he not have his own work.

  ‘I am a little man helping Anupama carrying the firewood for my muscles. Jayamal chops the wood and we put it in the oven and Jayamal lights it. Jayamal laughs. The axe is very sharp.

  I have an idea about the wood. I am not going to tell you.

  Mohan’

  Martine missed the variegated tones and voices in the letters, even missed her puzzlement about them. Then she began to doubt herself. Did I imagine it, that night at the swimming pool? Did he ever turn to me at all?

  The week after the Kress dinner, Martine followed Charlie into the student bar.

  ‘So shall we…?’ Her mouth was dry. ‘Is there somewhere here we could…? Before work? At the end of the day?’

  His wave was still tied up.

  ‘Not at work, sure enough.’ He chuckled, turning back to his pint.

  In July, he loitered after a meeting. ‘How about a hotel, now?’

  Her stomach flipped.

  ‘How trite,’ she said.

  Another day came.

  ‘Do you have a big car?’ she asked.

  She was thinking an ample back seat.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding, now.’

  More days passed.

  ‘What’s wrong with your place?’ was the next thing he suggested.

  All those other encounters there, she supposed.

  Most people want what they can’t have. Martine wanted what she could never be, and one thing she could never be was Charlie. Where she believed herself light, he seemed to her dark and threatening; when she felt dark and unlovable, he seemed to her bright white. If ever they came together it would be at the terminator, the line between dark and illumination. That meant she had to go for him, she knew.

  One August day in 1986, after her Egyptian holiday, Charlie’s Irish lilt through the phone slapped her from her chair. She could hear his untransmitted voice as well somewhere near in the college buildings, through an open window. Charlie in stereo.

  ‘How much longer will this take, now?’

  ‘What are you on about?’ she floundered.

  He laughed. Despite his hints, and her misgivings, that he had higher powers of communication, apparently he thrived on uncertainty and double meanings.

  She stammered, ‘All this ramping up and backing down. Are we ever going to…?’

  He shrugged invisibly on the phone. ‘If it happens, so. I’ll not be the male Neanderthal brandishing the club of my will to drag a woman home.’

  Testosterone seemed to course along the line.

  If she said ‘I’ll set something up myself, shall I?’ she sensed he’d only snip back with ‘Don’t come the old colonial with me’ or something, at once belittling and charming her.

  One of his main attractions was his abused-by-the-English, war-torn, sea-separated country, which she felt outshone her origins by miles.

  She stood over a paper on her desk: a statistical breakdown of so-called ‘illegal aliens’ in the school population of London. Charlie was as alien as a man could be, tempting her from his unknown element.

  She played him at his vagueness sport. ‘There’s a parents’ evening coming up, to explain LIPSS.’

  She named the Hackney school of the bungled kiss. In fact, neither of them had to be there; she took deceit a step further, giving him the wrong date and time.

  Deserted netball courts and red, blue and yellow game markings on melting tarmac under the hot stale air of a London evening with the sweat glueing Martine’s armpits. Will Charlie come? she wondered. Does he already know my game? Her heart skipped at the sight of his kicking walk. When he got to her he leaned back, shielding his eyes, and skimmed the high blank windows of the school.

  He stared at her, laughing. ‘But it’s all shut, so.’

  She’d thought that sex somewhere like this would shake the routine she’d recently got stuck in, except that, as he was pointing out, the gates were padlocked and the walls were topped with wire.

  He turned away from the main entrance, set off along the pavement at a lick. Martine never normally followed, but this time she followed. They entered the wide field of Victoria Park, swathes of parching grass on unbuilt land. He headed for the skate park in the middle. The concrete ramps were empty, graffiti
ed. He kicked his way towards a ramp. He looked at her, laughing again. He began to unbuckle his belt; it jangled. Her throat went dry.

  She lay down on the baked ramp, swearing when she banged the back of her head, folded up her skirt and found a condom from her bag. Charlie snorted with amusement or annoyance. Someone kicked a football and a child hallooed in the open pastures of the park. She felt on view, and yet that seemed a good idea.

  ‘Wankers Unite!’ yelled a large graffiti slogan, the i phallic, its dot a spray of sperm. She reached up, hooking Charlie by his belt-loops towards her face. There was a windless heat. She unzipped him and reached in and pulled his genitalia out. She weighed their ripe smell in her hands and studied the cock, curving, beginning to stir over the huge swell of his balls.

  He pulled away with a grunt and launched his trunk at her, winding her and banging her head again. He smelt of a butcher’s shop. He tried to kiss her, but their teeth clashed in a meaty gust and his tongue slopped away. She moved to untie his hair, but he growled and wouldn’t have it. He wrenched up her blouse and bra, strangling her chest, ogling her breasts, paying her back for her earlier stare, then let out a bellow of laughter into his armpit. She wriggled out of her knickers. His fingers manhandled the condom, refusing to let her dress him, blundering about.

  He wouldn’t let her guide him, mishitting many times, and when he found her, his entry was painful. He slammed her legs down on the ramp, wouldn’t let her wrap them round him. They went on, Martine trying to rise, he shoving, jerking, out of time. He pinned her hair down with a fist but she croaked and tossed her head, needles stabbing at her scalp as strands of her hair tore out. He twisted and cursed and ejaculated, eventually.

  Later that evening, back in her Stockwell home, she sprawled in her Eames chair fingering her near concussion and reliving the encounter. She’d found it disgusting and delicious, offs and ons and ons and offs, an uncouth binary code. She pondered what the act had been: either mutual bullying, or mutual self-expression. She thought, Why can’t I tell?