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Bowl of Fruit

Page 15

by Panayotis Cacoyannis


  Equidistant from the flashing police cars, an old-looking grey-green sedan is askew in the middle of the road with its windshield smashed into pieces. Both of its front doors are wide open, the driver’s hanging off one of its hinges. A shiny motorcycle helmet that sits upended on the bonnet seems otherwise incongruously intact. From where we are standing I am unable to see if or how much the front of the car has been damaged, and there is no sign of a motorcycle anywhere, just an unidentifiable scattering of different-sized pieces of debris across many of the visible parts of the street. I find the lack of sound disconcerting, and the fairground unreality of the scene makes me feel like I’m being disrespectful.

  More people are gathering around now. Undeterred by a policeman’s half-hearted exhortations to move on, they chatter like over-excited spectators – hired extras, even - on the set of a quirkily lit reality TV reconstruction, speculating wildly about who might have been injured, and how badly, in what might or might not have just happened.

  ‘That’s a hell of a lot of blood,’ someone says.

  ‘Where?’ a second person asks.

  ‘Right there,’ the first person points with a finger unclearly.

  ‘That’s not blood, that’s definitely oil,’ someone else insists.

  ‘Oil? Oil isn’t red.’

  ‘See that big kebab sign?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s red.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Same red that you’re seeing in the oil.’

  ‘You say it’s oil, I say it’s blood.’

  ‘Please, let’s get out of here,’ says Anna, ‘I can’t stand this gawping around any more, it’s indecent.’

  ‘Is there nothing we can do?’

  ‘We can hang around and get in the way just like everybody else,’ says Anna irritably.

  Laboriously we extricate ourselves from this mesmerized early morning crowd, and as we walk along the opposite direction of Kentish Town Road I map out in my head a different route to Tufnell Park. I can make our journey last a little longer if I like; as though piqued by our casual invocation, the world of everything and everywhere became the world of now in Kentish Town, overlapping with our world to throw it momentarily out of kilter. Now is not such a good time to mention the room.

  ‘I’m sorry I snapped at you,’ says Anna.

  We’re in Bartholomew Road, heading south. We should cut across to our left, but we don’t.

  ‘The whole thing was upsetting,’ I say.

  ‘Why’s the world of everything and everywhere always something awful?’

  ‘To remind us,’ I say.

  ‘To remind us of what?’

  ‘That we shouldn’t be ungrateful, I suppose. And to actually care what happens to other people.’

  ‘To pity them, you mean. And how’s that any better than being voyeurs?’

  ‘Because it isn’t titillation,’ I say.

  ‘It’s self-indulgent whichever way you look at it,’ says Anna. ‘With or without “too much for one man to bear”.’

  ‘You’re still angry,’ I say.

  ‘It’s finding consolation in people’s misfortune,’ says Anna. ‘Isn’t that as bad as titillation? It is titillation, in fact.’

  ‘I think it’s humbling,’ I say.

  ‘I didn’t see anyone humble back there, did you?’

  ‘We were there too,’ I say.

  ‘And I think we stayed too long,’ says Anna.

  ‘You’re punishing yourself unnecessarily,’ I say. ‘You’re just frustrated there was nothing we could do. And it’s not true that it’s always something awful.’

  I’m trying to think of examples, but Anna seems pacified now, and we plod along slightly deflated. At the end of the road we turn left. Anna holds onto my arm, and I feel her body convulsing. It’s already after dawn, and the birds are twittering loudly. Even before she has started to snivel I know that she’s crying.

  ‘Don’t be sad,’ I say.

  ‘Cry-babies, aren’t we,’ Anna whispers sweetly. ‘After everything I said to you earlier I caught myself thinking, did we need to come across that tonight? I’m such a hypocrite, I know.’

  ‘I’m sure I thought exactly the same.’

  ‘But it’s callous.’

  ‘How? Callous means cruel, or at least indifferent, and you know you’re not either.’

  ‘Then it’s selfish.’

  ‘It’s self-preservation. Selfish in a harmless sort of way.’

  ‘Do you think that was blood?’

  ‘I honestly don’t.’

  ‘Why? Because of that stupid kebab sign?’

  ‘If that was blood, the person whose blood it was wouldn’t have been moved away so quickly.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ I say.

  Anna leans her head against my shoulder.

  ‘It’s been a long night,’ she says.

  ‘It’s already day,’ I say.

  ‘Are we nearly there?’

  ‘Five more minutes,’ I say.

  ‘No more ambulances,’ Anna says.

  ‘One was already too many.’

  ‘Two,’ Anna says.

  ‘Two?’

  ‘Baboon’s bottom,’ Anna says.

  ‘Ah,’ I say.

  ‘We were laughing,’ Anna says.

  ‘But not out of callousness,’ I say.

  ‘How quickly we forget,’ Anna says.

  ‘But not out of callousness,’ I say again.

  Anna brings us to a standstill as she jerks herself away from my shoulder.

  ‘How do I look?’ she asks, using both hands to point my face in her direction, and then to hold it still. She looks as radiant as she did this morning – which has now become yesterday’s morning – and her smile is just as beguiling. ‘I’ve not stayed up all night since my twenties,’ she says.

  ‘I was miserable in my twenties,’ I say, ‘and I often stayed in bed all day. I don’t think I’ve ever stayed up the whole night.’

  ‘You’ve stayed up the whole night tonight,’ Anna says.

  ‘There’s a first time for everything,’ I say.

  ‘We mustn’t make a habit of it,’ Anna says.

  ‘You look perfect,’ I say. ‘Or is that too insipid?’

  Anna shakes her head to say no. As her mouth breaks into a smile she lets go of my face and takes me again by the arm.

  ‘Take me home,’ she says.

  We start walking, and our step is firm and steady.

  13

  Mothers

  Twenty-four hours

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ I say. ‘Or you might think I’m crazy.’

  ‘I already think you’re crazy,’ Anna laughs. ‘I think we’re both slightly crazy, or we wouldn’t still be roaming the streets nearly twenty-four hours after I met you for coffee.’

  We’re idling at the corner of my street and Brecknock Road, literally a handful of minutes away from my door.

  ‘We keep saying that it’s been a long day, or that it’s been a long night, and then we find a different way to make it last longer - the day and the night, and now the morning.’

  ‘It’s the day and the night that didn’t want to end.’

  ‘And the morning?’ Anna asks.

  ‘The morning is now, so the morning most of all.’

  ‘There’s a long-legged tropical lizard called twenty-four hours,’ says Anna. ‘You know why it’s called that? If it touches you you’re dead within twenty-four hours.’

  ‘I don’t see the connection,’ I say.

  ‘Our lives are ruled by superstition,’ Anna answers obscurely. ‘So tell me why you’re crazy. I mean why I might think that you’re crazy.’

  ‘We really are nearly there now,’ I say. ‘Is a nightcap necessarily alcoholic?’

  ‘Are you thinking of giving me cocoa?’

  ‘I can only give you tea or coffee,’ I say. ‘But there’s a twenty-four hour shop just round the corner.’
r />   ‘Where they sell deadly lizards?’

  I laugh at Anna’s joke distractedly; right now deadly lizards are far down on the list of what preoccupies me most.

  ‘There’s this room in my house that you might think is odd,’ I say. ‘Billy mentioned it earlier.’

  ‘Tea will be fine,’ says Anna. ‘And I’ll tell you what I think of the room when I see it.’

  ‘It’s just a metaphor,’ I say.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The room,’ I say.

  ‘The room is just a metaphor?’ Anna repeats inquisitorially.

  ‘I’ll let you see it first,’ I say, ‘and then I’ll explain.’

  ‘I hope it isn’t kinky,’ says Anna.

  ‘It’s very bare,’ I say.

  ‘And bare can’t be kinky?’

  ‘It’s not kinky,’ I say.

  ‘Lead me to it,’ says Anna. ‘I need to sit down.’

  ‘I have lots of different flavours,’ I say.

  We’re mounting the few steps to the entrance. I turn my key in the lock. I go in first, and I hold the door open for Anna.

  ‘A whole house to yourself?’

  ‘With a garden,’ I say.

  The light switch to the living room is in the hallway, and I turn it on.

  ‘And there it is,’ I say as we go in. ‘My room within a room.’

  With its double door shut, the room looks like an ominous box – a contemporary sculpture, perhaps, or an unconventionally wrapped enormous Christmas present. I have grown so used to it, and in such a short time it’s become so familiarly an integral part of the house, that if I were alone I wouldn’t even know it was there, in the sense that it wouldn’t have occurred to me it didn’t belong – hadn’t always belonged – exactly where it is. But with Anna standing next to me, staring and saying nothing and looking aghast, the room rapidly transforms before my eyes into something grotesque, not so much a folly as a vice…

  ‘What is it?’ Anna manages to ask.

  ‘Just another room,’ I say.

  ‘And it’s empty?’

  ‘Not completely,’ I say. ‘It’s the room that Billy helped me find some furniture for.’

  ‘Show me,’ says Anna.

  ‘I will,’ I say. ‘But shall I make the tea first?’

  ‘Show me now,’ says Anna.

  We should make our grand entrance through the grand double door. I turn the handle and pull the left-hand wing of it outwards. I step aside and Anna goes in. I close the door behind us to give Anna the room’s full effect.

  ‘As you can see it’s just an ordinary human room,’ I say, ‘but somewhat on the small side. And the ceilings aren’t as high as they should be.’

  ‘Bare, you said,’ Anna gulps.

  A single, metal-framed four-poster bed, a leather couch, a small armchair, a table, a wooden chair, a rug on the floor and a polished chest of drawers by the bed – that’s quite a lot of furniture, and when you add to it a painting and Billy’s ticking clock, the room to an outsider must seem over-furnished and rather antiquely haphazard. Bare it certainly isn’t.

  ‘All these doors,’ Anna says.

  ‘That’s the telephone I spoke to you on,’ I say, pointing at the chest of drawers by the side of the bed. ‘It shouldn’t really be there, nor should the clock be on the wall, it should be on the chest of drawers where the telephone is, so clearly I’m not a fanatic.’

  ‘A fanatic?’

  ‘The orientation is probably wrong as well,’ I say. ‘But then the room never really existed, and the description of it isn’t always clear, for example the position of the doors is very vague, there’s a door by the bed, and then there are doors to the right and to the left, but to the right and left of what? And I was also constrained by the architecture of the house, and by this window, so this room was never going to replicate that room exactly.’

  ‘Slow down,’ Anna says. ‘What room didn’t really exist? Is this room supposed to be that room?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I mean no, it’s not really supposed to be that room, but it’s supposed to evoke it.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Anna says. ‘In what way to evoke it?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘You’re agitated,’ Anna says.

  ‘Because I’m obviously creeping you out,’ I say. ‘I told you you’d think the room was odd.’

  ‘I’m just trying to figure out what the metaphor is,’ Anna says. ‘All those papers on the table… Is this where you write?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘And it’s also where I sleep.’

  ‘You write by hand?’

  ‘Always,’ I say.

  When Anna notices the painting, she leans over the table to look at it more closely.

  ‘That’s another liberty I took,’ I say, but already she’s completely transfixed.

  ‘Pardon?’ she asks absently.

  ‘The picture that hung over the table in the original room had been cut out of a glossy magazine; it wasn’t a painting. But the subject matter was the same.’

  ‘A woman in fur.’

  ‘Woman in fur (1906).’

  ‘So it is a Picasso,’ Anna gasps.

  ‘I couldn’t resist it,’ I say.

  ‘You mean you painted it recently?’

  ‘And I painted it that size to fit the frame. I never used to frame my paintings – my Picassos, I should say – but the picture in the story has a gilt frame like this one, and it also suits the painting, I think.’

  ‘But when did you paint it?’ Anna insists.

  ‘Not long ago,’ I say. ‘It’s the only Picasso I’ve painted since I stopped painting Picassos, and I painted it here, in this room.’

  ‘So you haven’t really stopped,’ Anna says.

  ‘I stopped, and now I’ve stopped again,’ I say. ‘This time for good.’

  ‘It’s so beautiful,’ says Anna.

  ‘1906 was a good year for portraits,’ I say.

  ‘1906 was a good year for portraits,’ Anna repeats, and simultaneously we’re both convulsed with laughter again.

  Muse

  ‘This room is your muse,’ Anna says.

  ‘Except it hasn’t really worked,’ I say.

  ‘But you know that’s not true,’ says Anna.

  ‘I’ve written someone else’s stories and I’ve painted someone else’s painting. Same old, same old, in other words.’

  We’re perched next to each other on the leather sofa, having peppermint tea in the room, and I still haven’t explained it. I’m surprised and disappointed that Anna hasn’t guessed it – Billy got it in a flash even before it was built. Now that it’s become my room, perhaps the original intention is obscured, unless of course the problem is the lack of an enormous insect hiding under the bed.

  ‘You say it so casually,’ says Anna. ‘Same old, same old, like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world.’

  ‘What’s extraordinary is this,’ I say. ‘You and me together in this room.’

  ‘This room that I still don’t get,’ Anna says.

  ‘This room that pays homage to Kafka,’ I say.

  ‘To Kafka…’ Anna muses.

  ‘In quite a literal way.’

  ‘You mean it’s in one of his stories.’

  ‘It’s in my favourite one of his stories.’

  ‘It’s the bug’s room in The Metamorphosis.’

  ‘It’s Gregor’s room,’ I say.

  ‘Isn’t Gregor the bug?’

  ‘It’s more the other way around,’ I say.

  ‘You mean the bug is Gregor,’ Anna says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think the bug is the bug and Gregor is Gregor,’ Anna says. ‘But they’re also one and the same, in other words they’re both things at once. It’s a bit like you and the paintings. They’re yours and they’re Picassos, but they’re also something else.’

  ‘They’re not really Picassos,’ I say.

  ‘Earlier you were saying that they weren’t really your
s.’

  ‘Not in any meaningful sense, no.’

  ‘But they must be something,’ Anna says, ‘so what are they?’

  ‘This is such a silly conversation,’ I say, ‘and we’ve been having it all day.’

  ‘A paradox,’ says Anna. ‘That’s what they are. And now you’re in this room, writing stories by Kafka.’

  ‘The room’s obviously backfired,’ I say. ‘And I’ve stopped writing stories by Kafka.’

  ‘You’ve stopped?’

  ‘Since Their Meeting on the Bridge.’

  ‘Which you’ve shredded.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, but I haven’t.

  ‘Like all the other Kafka stories.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Hidden somewhere else like a keepsake, Their Meeting on the Bridge is my one Kafka secret.

  ‘Apart from The Ledger.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But there’s a pile of things here,’ says Anna, pointing at the stacks of paper on the table. ‘It can’t all be The Ledger.’

  ‘That’s just a pile of rubbish,’ I say.

  ‘Which you wrote?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Before or after Their Meeting on the Bridge?’

  ‘After,’ I say.

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you haven’t shredded everything,’ says Anna.

  ‘Not everything, no.’

  ‘You told me you had.’

  ‘Honestly, that’s just a pile of rubbish, and I didn’t want the sky to be you.’

  ‘The sky?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say.

  ‘So let me get this right. You’ve not shredded what you wrote after Their Meeting on the Bridge.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And Their Meeting on the Bridge was written when?’

  ‘Just before I painted Woman in Fur.’

  ‘Which wasn’t very long ago, you said.’

  ‘Maybe a couple of months.’

  ‘So in two months you’ve written all this.’

  ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve never painted anything that wasn’t a Picasso.’

  ‘Never,’ I say.

  ‘And you’ve never even tried.’

 

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