by Jonathan Lee
Anyway, that’s the story of my meeting with a famous author, and my trouble at the university, and how my marriage began.
Skip Notes
6 Sadly now out of print, Counsellor, but nonetheless available from one persistent seller on Amazon’s esteemed second-hand marketplace.
7 Wrighting being used by me in the sense of the word playwright, Counsellor, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that if we dissect that word, the word playwright, we find that the noun on which the verb play leans refers to a person who makes, constructs, or repairs, e.g. a wheelwright, or a shipwright (or, presumably, Frank Lloyd Wright, Orville Wright, Wilbur Wright), and thus the prefix and suffix mingle to describe a person who has wrought language, ideas and character into a dramatic form. The homophone with write is in this case no more than an interesting coincidence, an example of the way that language itself is preternaturally wrought in all kinds of interesting ways.
8 Making a comeback, I’m pleased to note.
9 Yes, let me think, pretty much. Her actual last words, uttered on Platform 14, following the gift of the tattered receipt, were probably – and of course recollection is more imprecise art than solid science, the human brain tending to reweave as much as retrieve experiences – Well, nice to meet you, to which I replied (I think), And lovely to meet you, following which she said, See you then, to which I said, Yes, thanks, see you, following which she said Bye, and I said Bye, and she gave me a half-wave with her body rotated at one hundred and eighty degrees, and I stood waving too, and pretending to need to phone my wife urgently, just to let the awkwardness of our passing pass, when in fact I knew that my wife would be working for a good few hours still, even though Thursday nights are – were – are – our nights, and there was no real rush at all.
11.45 a.m.
RUNNING OUT of fuel, Joy thinks, tugging a sports bra over her breasts. Humanity itself is running out of fuel. The half-dressed girl on the next bench is taking gleeful greedy swigs from a bottled mixture called Rocket, the downward slope of the ‘R’ accented with a bright lightning bolt, but this fragile-looking brunette isn’t heading to Mars or even Marylebone, is simply looking for a kick to get her through half an hour of exercise and then back to her desk, to her computer, to the two dozen emails she’ll have been sent since leaving her seat. Hardly that different from the cycle of Joy’s own daily life, and yet the scale of Rocket Girl’s assumed ambitions strikes her, in this moment, as heartbreakingly small. An almost-pretty young thing; trainee, probably. Elegant shoulders. Hard to keep those through your thirties. It’s clear as Joy turns to the mirror, clear what a decade huddled over QUERTY has done, the knottedness that comes from typing out late-night notes with titles like ‘Frozen Meats: The Regulatory Landscape’. The poultry industry is under pressure to investigate new ways of improving sanitation and minimising feather pecking. It hopes to avoid recourse to beak trimming. It is best practice for broiler companies to consider the relationship between (a) strain of bird, (b) housing environment, (c) stocking density and (d) feeding regimen. I mean, really, who fucking cares?
She cares and she doesn’t care. Increasingly she agrees with those intense walking-boot wearers who campaign for standards and transparency about standards. Sometimes even agrees with the ones who use that grandest of words, Ethics. There’s a product liability lawyer in her team called Tiny Tony – taller and better-looking than Peter’s nickname gives him credit for, actually – and he has a new officemate, a guy who really is one of God’s cruder pet projects, a guy who on his first day at the firm tacked to his pinboard a motto which reads ‘Consumers are Fools; Client is King’. And while Joy realises that life is too messy for anyone to be perfectly good, it’s apparent, taking this new recruit as a case in point, that some people are making more effort than others. She is not aiming to deceive the public in the way he may be, but her job nonetheless involves sneaking around the boundaries of what’s true. There’s no expectation to lie, exactly, just to find ingenious means of disguising reality, remodelling unhelpful facts by dressing them in helpful facts and half-truths and the odd nicely caveated view. Unlike the painful paperwork, internal politics and antisocial hours, this part of the job – the exercise in reality management, the ritual of transforming one thing into another – used to make her happy, and for years she really did believe all the John Locke, Thomas Jefferson stuff about life being the pursuit of happiness. Only now, too late, does she feel that chasing this most conformist of ethical aims, of societal demands – Be happy! You deserve it! You can do it! – has taken her on a savage, obscurely sadistic path. Through her twenties she approached every dark desire and unhappy thought with the self-help-book belief that she could will it away; could, through a series of further choices, win herself the contentment she deserved. But every time she’s gone full-tilt in pursuit of bliss, believed those fundamentalists who rule luck out of life, everyone has ended up getting hurt. Side effects may include disappointment: this is the health warning our search for happiness should wear. Disappointment and selfishness.
Is she still selfish? Maybe. But she is convinced, almost convinced, that her present pursuit, the hunt for something beyond happiness, incorporates an altruistic desire to leave things in good order, to make life easier for others. It irritates her that by mislaying her tennis racket she has let her lunchtime tennis buddy down and created a glitch in the structure of the day, this day that’s supposed to be about her rediscovering some kind of goal and control. The error niggles like unironed linen on a Sunday night.
Before summoning the special effort required to leave her BlackBerry behind in the changing rooms, Joy tries to phone Christine. This time there is no instant voicemail greeting; two rings and the line connects. It’s a line saturated by static, though, her friend’s words periodically obscured.
‘Joyous? Sorry, darling, I…Joyous?…I’m in…still there?’
Mimicking these pauses and resumptions Joy begins to explain that they’ll have to cancel their match, but it isn’t clear how much Christine hears; her reply, when it comes, seems to spring from an entirely different subject: ‘Honestly, husbands. Peter’s such a clever…cunt, sometimes. I’m sorry if that shocks you.’
‘No, no,’ Joy says, though people’s choice of language constantly shocks her. Her nephew would sometimes come out with peculiarly adult words: drainpipe; muesli. They had always arrived in her ears as lessons: he would grow up, change, hold conversations with plumbers and…muesli sellers. ‘Cunt’ has given her a little glimpse of another Christine: older, angrier, less willing to submit.
Beginning again she says, ‘Christine, I…’ but the crackles kick in and before the double beep of the phone call dying she only has time to add, awkwardly, ‘You’re lovely, you know.’ She blows her nose and ties her laces.
Samir is sitting behind the fitness centre’s only computer. He is doing some kind of neck-stretching routine. The visible sliver of PC screen shows an image of his Antipodean manager – Jock, Jack? – smiling.
‘Hi, Sam,’ she says. ‘Just you in charge today?’
‘Oh hi Miss Stephens! Jack is not back until later.’
A shame not to have one last look at Jack, at those cheekbones that remind her of a cunnilingus-loving IT genius she made love to one summer. He was a Systems Interrogator, but the joke wore thin.
Samir closes the world wide window and says, ‘Very very big day today Miss Stephens!’
‘Sorry?’
‘Your brilliant promotion! I got the email.’
‘That went to everybody?’
‘Champagne at five it said.’
‘Prosecco, probably. It’s not 2007.’
‘No it is not,’ he says, an earnest blink revising his eyes. ‘Would you like to start with a run?’
She nearly says something about it being her last session with him, but instead merely offers a nod. Is this why
she’s bothered coming into work today, to try and say goodbye? Do normal people exercise before taking their lives? Is there a set of agreed rules for the process she’s in? A partner in Structured Finance is doing sit-ups, holding a medicine ball to his heart. Sweat has made his T-shirt a hundred shades of grey. In this mirrored room five or six others are running into their reflections, lifting weights, loading bars with Olympic plates. Strange places, gyms: hideaways where people look to develop aggression, or disperse it. Hard to say which category she fits.
Stretching, she listens to Samir talk about his dad. His mother comes up often, but this is the first time she’s heard about the father, and she always likes to hear about people’s fathers. Sometimes, noting her rapt attentiveness to such stories, she wonders if she’s hoping to apprehend noble paternal attributes she can transfer to her own dad, embellishing an evasive image of him with borrowed details. Talking to Dennis about her childhood, hearing her voice falter into the confidential fizz of a confession, she has on occasion found imaginary anecdotes creeping into her speech and taking on – through the effort of invention and the feat of repeating them – the authenticity of actual memories.
‘You think he’d like to go back to what he was doing in Bangladesh?’ she says. ‘To teaching?’
‘Perhaps it is too late now Miss Stephens. Father still likes to teach people things though. Even if it is only teaching junior waiters how to carry three plates.’
‘And what does he like to teach you?’
‘Me? For a while in Sylhet it was algebra. And then English. Now mainly it is marriage and things of that nature. He is keen to introduce me to a nice teenage girl.’
‘As in, arranged?’
‘That is the idea. I suppose it has its advantages. I would like to share everything with somebody one day.’
‘And what’s in it for this girl, exactly, to get hitched to a stranger, married off with no part in the process?’
Oh, God, listen: every time she aims for Virtue she misses the junction, ends up in Selfish Bitch.
‘Um,’ Samir says, disinfecting the machine and programming her run, choosing inclines and distances, setting the calorie count. ‘In terms of what she would get I suppose there is perhaps protecting her chastity. Family honour. And the matter of lower household expenses. Not that I am financially that brilliant yet but…’
The temperamental treadmill starts with a jolt. She jogs. She will go at her own pace. It won’t matter what Samir says, it will only matter that he is saying something, because as her laces start to wave and her heart grows hard this is precisely what she needs, a noise beyond her own body, a thought beyond her own head. His voice always carries a sweet, stirring note of enthusiasm, speech somehow animating not just his face but the room around it, and only in silence does the positivity of his presence seem to wane; peering in at him as the gym door swings open she has before now noticed how gaunt and scared he looks, half drowned in a tracksuit, eager for his next client to come. Communication gives him courage, it appears, and some of it he feeds into her.
Joy runs. At first she feels her muscles as burdens on her lungs and bones, but slowly, slowly, the legs begin to lengthen, buttocks begin to tighten, breasts buoy and lighten the load on her chest and strictly held by nothing at all she feels loosely bound to the room around her, suspended between the basement gym of Hanger, Slyde & Stein and somewhere more like life. A series of beeps mark her progress towards top speed. Her own motion becomes a kind of inward fluttering, the dissolution of all physical resistance, the wall of mirror making light caress her clavicle as clogged thoughts rearrange themselves, the surf-like sound of the conveyor belt creating space for her to breathe and think. I mean it is not that I agree with arranged marriage. I mean I am not certain it is a brilliant idea. Some fertile presence within Joy is kicking back at Samir’s speech, finding friction in memories of Hampstead Heath. When her mind is searching out happy times it always seems to find its way here, to the Heath, thoughts spinning, wheeling, the air streaming with the smell of cold glades, woodland, heathland, meadow, as if she’s running fast through its landscape, all this air submitting to her body’s own eloquence, and it is a landscape, it is a landscape containing dreamy trees and formless clouds and a picnic blanket loaded with cheese and ham and olives in brine and one or more cheap boxes of wine, it is a landscape containing her sister and her nephew, the three of them in their favourite quiet clearing eating and talking, islanded in newspapers and games, the soft swelter of summer in the air, flocks of birds mixing with other flocks, and amid the dozen-birded blur you are almost feverish, ill, deliciously ill like the times you were a child in your parents’ bed, alone but not lonely, everything hyperreal, moments folding in on themselves, minutes like paper or Morse code or music, and it is a landscape, close up it is definitely that, but from far away the Heath itself looks like a face, your sister’s face, full of puffy eyes and swollen cheeks and twisted smiles, and from where you are – not close, not far – running, running, you can see the landscape and the face, both at once, one and then the other, and it makes you so tired you have to close your eyes and dip your head and imagine you’re a poplar leaning in the wind. Eyes closed, your limbs are the things that are moving but the movement can feel more near and slight than that, the way different stories move through your thoughts on the nights you can’t sleep, when you’re lying there or sitting pillow-propped and thinking of people the police should be speaking to, gestures you could have made towards your sister to make it all OK, thinking about how the vanishing of people, their death or disappearance or dwindling, makes you aware of your being here, making stupid circles round the stray grey cells of your mind, running through scenarios, listening to the faint thunderstorm of your husband’s small-hours snores – Do you perhaps plan to run any marathons? – I am running the marathon for a charity – spaces – perhaps they still have spaces – fancy dress – the brilliant things people wear – are you OK? – are you OK? – are you OK? – Joy looks up into the mirror and runs into its deep light space, into her own self, a floating effortless athlete, and like one of those bulldog recruiters who constantly calls your direct dial, takes a hint you give and turns it into an emblem of some bigger thing, keeps you talking, tries to lead you into the murky outer circles of friendship by talking talking talking, she is unstoppable, breathless, so persistent that in the end everyone either hangs up hard or cries or kills themselves or says, Fair enough, why not, I’ll send you my CV.
‘Are you OK? Are you all right? Miss Stephens? You are very focused today.’
Focus. That’s it. Not desperation and despair. Clarity, focus, expedience. That’s why she’s picked today, an anniversary of sorts. Anniversaries are nice neat shadows of prior days – flat, exact, with the muted truth that distance gives.
‘Miss Stephens allow me to get you a towel and then perhaps it would be a good time to –’
‘Rowing,’ she says, slowing the treadmill. ‘Next, let’s do, rowing machine. Shoulders. I’m keen to work on my shoulders.’
Samir
ALLOW ME to wipe that. It has dripped a little coffee. No wait it will not take a second I have a napkin here. Wait!
Sorry. I…
No your suggestion was…Why not just leave it. Forgive me.
Yes.
Yes I suppose. Even at school. My teacher in Sylhet. Not my father they would not let him teach me but a friend and colleague of his. He used to say An orderly pencil case Samir! Very good to have an orderly pencil case! But in England this seemed less popular. It was better to have a disorderly pencil case and to embellish it with Tipp-Ex pictures. Skulls. Body parts. Diagrams of that nature.
When I left school I did not have brilliant exam grades and I had missed getting waiter experience. I was behind some of the other boys from Sylhet in this respect. So when I began to work with Father at the Raj while I did my fitness diploma Father’s manager decided I should
not do front of house. Not until I had gained experience. Instead I cleaned. Kitchen and toilets. This is why I am grateful for the very clean toilets at Hanger, Slyde & Stein. I see the Brazilian lady come in every two hours. We smile at each other. Once you have cleaned a toilet professionally you know what it involves and you make sure to smile. If she enters the lavatory while I am in the cubicle I do a quick Astaire so that she knows to wait. Then I smile on my way out.
Well some aspects were brilliant. The free food was very good. I was close to my father. But there were the smells. Those could be very bad. Meaty smells and trails of paper that got dragged across the floor. Like…bolts? Bolts of paper lightning. And people blowing their nose into the sink. Bits in the sink that remain after rinsing. Bits in the bowl that cling through the flush. The freshener that makes the smells worse by making them a little sharp. It is trying to improve the air but it makes it much worse. Sickly. Sweet. Whoever invented the toilet air-freshener made a mistake. Not a mistake as bad as some of mine but a mistake nonetheless.
Examples? There are so many! Only last Friday I…
I have been trying to tell Jack about a problem that occurred on Friday. But then I thought. I thought what if this on top of all the other little things makes him ask me to leave. To leave my job. I love my job. Drawing up the schedules for my clients. The seaside sound of the ergos at top speed. The click of the coffee machine behind the fire door. If they knew what I had done that might all disappear.
And then there are only moments! We have only moments to talk together. Jack has to conduct his boxercise class. Or I see the water cooler needs attention. Every now and then I have asked Jack if he would like to come to my home sometime. To talk about important issues or perhaps nothing at all. I have checked with Father and he does not seem to mind if Jack comes round sometime to watch a DVD and drink something cold. But Jack is a busy man. He plays a lot of sport. One time the other week he said he would visit but he got held up. He said Sorry mate you know how it is. I know how it is. It was no problem. I had set aside a pile of DVDs we might watch but it does not take long to make or unmake a pile. It takes no time at all.