by Jonathan Lee
Dennis
PROBLEM WAS, Counsellor, I’d decided not to think about things. I’d come to the conclusion, after meeting Beverley Badger on the train, that I’d spent too much of my life thinking, had in fact during the last year or so become a procrastinating Nabokovian caricature of myself, overthinking my cover letters, my sample chapters, my sales pitch, my blurb, my career, my marriage. In short, I’d overcomplicated the whole tawdry business of living. The proverbial proof was in the proverbial pudding. In the process of trying to distract Joy from past traumas – by not mentioning the traumas, by mentioning everything else but the traumas, probing at issues only obliquely, via obscure philosophers and Shakespearean characters – I had allowed my marriage to acquire the distracted character of the distractions I’d engendered to distract her.10 On the job front, I had analysed the situation with the student I now refer to as the CAUB11 for many weeks, deciding what I should do about her veiled threats to make me sorry if I didn’t up her grades, hesitating as to whether to speak with the Dean given her father (the CAUB’s father) was such a powerful figure on the board, and amid this perfect storm of variables she (the CAUB) got in first, citing leg-stroking and attempted nether-region-groping, and suddenly I was in this massive professional elephant trap. And the book? Months had passed in which I’d revised and re-sent and waited and revised and re-sent and waited and had received not a word of encouragement from anyone and then – then! – on the one occasion when I’d decided not to think something through, to just come right out and without hesitation or pre-planning or delay say hello to Opportunity (in the elegant guise of Beverley), I had walked away with the email address of a top London literary agent, and the memory of a quite lovely train journey to wind through my mind forever. It was, yes, a sign.12
So, Counsellor, with Impulse as my new God, on that Thursday afternoon before Joy-Joy’s fall, I typed a quick three-line email to Abby Aardvark. I read it back to myself only once, and felt sure that it would end the run of twenty-seven straight rejections from literary agents. I thought about waiting to press send, but then the more I thought about it, about whether five-ish on a Thursday was a good time to catch a successful agent (what if she was heading off for a long weekend in her Courchevel chalet?), the more I also thought (in parallel with the thought about whether to wait to send the email) about my resolution not to think. Ergo, after thinking things through but also not thinking things through, I just sent it.
Now, pleased with my new personality, I took myself downstairs, passing the paint pots that always hug the walls and nestle in the corner places, and got myself a glass of really rather good deep ruby red. It was not yet past my own self-imposed watershed for snifters and chasers (6 p.m. weekdays; 11.30 a.m. weekends) but I felt I deserved a drink. I’d spent too much time of late worrying about the generalities of grammar, and about even bigger things too, like Death. The chrome-framed photographs, the symmetrical lamps with their porcelain curves, the precious glass figurines with their special see-through grace, they had all acquired the sorrowful sparkle of some big ominous thing beyond my control, and it is hard to explain how the glint of this mystical thing (this thing which I will call Death) had become such a distraction in my field of vision of late, but it had. And here I was, the night before my wife’s own encounter with Death, feeling powerful and focused and suddenly free of it, free of mortal fears, ably assisted by the second, third and fourth glasses of wine swilling through my system and my soul. I did some drunken bicep curls, keeping my back straight and my elbows tucked, and hoped this would add a year or two to my life.
So far so good, yes, Counsellor? But around twenty minutes into my exercise routine I received a terrible shock that punctured my bubble of new-found fearlessness.
Jesus Christ, I said.
Evening, Peter said.
I was, yes, hanging upside down, shirtless, for I have this contraption I can set up in the living room, you see, that allows one to work on the abdominal muscles from a tilted position.
How did you get into my home? I asked.
You are funny Dennis! he said. The killer question is why you left the front door open.
Oh, I said, remembering that, given the heating was on the blink, I’d opted to let some of the hot air out.
That’ll be why you’re sweating so much, he said.
What? I said.
Is it always this silent in here? he said.
We were going at cross purposes like that, him leaning forward on the Jacobsen as if he owned it, me by now sitting on the carpet beside my contraption, wiping my chest with an exercise towel, feeling that the continuing need to hold my head at such an upward angle was putting me at a disadvantage.
I think it shows real guts, he continued, for the two of you to live in such silence.
It’s only silent during the day, I said. When it’s just me here.
The famous sabbatical, he said. Yet more courage. You’re my hero, Dennis. If I too had some sort of creative gift to exercise, I would surrender the professional respect and enormous base salary plus bonus and just, you know, do it.
It was unclear, Counsellor, if he was being sarcastic.
Peter smiled and said, Your lovely wife said to me once you were a tortured genius.
Ah, I said, that’s very –
Without the genius bit. She has such spot-on timing, your wife! Makes her a thrilling litigator. Knows when to attack, when to hold back.
I said nothing, nothing at all, for really, truly, what could I say to this, this, this repugnant yuppie?
Joy’s not here? he asked. I was hoping to catch her. I’m awfully sorry if I disturbed you. You seem a little on edge. Are you expecting a guest, or something?
Absolutely not, I said.
He explained (which I found deadly strange) that he wanted to borrow Joy’s tennis racket, that he had been passing by on his way home and Christine had said, if you pass near Joy and Dennis’s place, be sure to take out Joy’s tennis racket on loan, because I’ve got a game tomorrow – this is what he said Christine said – and Joy won’t mind. He gave me this explanation, which even I would argue was long-winded (the explanation), and then said, with a smile, Christine’s is getting restrung, you see. Not as highly strung as your wife’s, probably, but it needs more tension. I’d loan her mine, but it’s far too big.
He said something along those lines, an imprecise lewdness lurking in the words, and I replied by saying Joy normally plays tennis herself on Fridays, with Christine, but he interrupted yet again and leant over and slapped me on the back, said the loan of the racket was appreciated, and he slapped me really quite hard because the sting crept round to my chest, and he said, My, my, you are sweaty, aren’t you?, something like that with a certain snarkiness in his voice, but then a second later he was making some general statement, about how he found it fascinating the places moisture collects on a woman’s body, and then again just like that he was back to the specific. General, specific, general, specific. That was his modus operandi.
No doubt she’ll be sweating tomorrow, Peter said. You should come see her speech. Or will you be busy packing for your holiday?
I explained, Counsellor, that we had no fixed plans to holiday this winter.
Surprising, he said. Do you like surprises, Dennis? Personally I love them.
I’ll get the tennis racket, I replied, but stayed sitting on my hands for a moment, just a moment, to stop the fingers (my fingers) shaking.
I had been humiliated. Humiliated by a yuppie asking for a tennis racket. Pathetic, isn’t it? You have to laugh, do you not, at this comico-sentimental life of mine, full of tiny daily battles, things which don’t matter at all in the grand scheme, silly local issues?
Yes, I’m inclined to agree with you on that, although as Miss Badger said to me on our train journey most of our fears are local these days, don’t you think? Despite the bombs on buses, the ash c
louds over Europe, our gradually warming globe, they are local, are they not, among the vast anonymous bustle of mouse-clicks and updates and downloads they are local: will this man attack me, will this person steal my child, will this food make me ill. These are the local fears, the primal terrors revived, are they not, Counsellor?13
What I haven’t mentioned so far is that on that Thursday night I was – despite what I said to Peter – expecting a visitor. I had a message from Joy-Joy saying that she’d be home late, and in light of that I, yes, really should have cancelled said visitor, a visitor who was in the…services industry, shall we say? But determined to rediscover that all-powerful state I’d experienced prior to Peter’s arrival, still tipsy on wine, recommencing my shirtless sit-ups, I became increasingly reluctant to do so.
Skip Notes
10 I’d been caught out by all these things happening at once, Counsellor, that was the thing. In the space of a few months there was Wimbledon and our marriage and the nephew news and the abortion (she decided after the wedding to have an abortion, and I protested but relented, always do relent, just like when she decided to stick with her maiden name, to tie herself to Stephens, to pass up the chance to change). All this in a few months, the implausible way significant events have of clustering, like ailments, like mosquito bites, around each other, and then there was my job, yes, the distractions on the job front…
11 Complete And Utter Bitch.
12 And I began (though I digress) to look for other signs, signs deep in my past, began to wonder whether my own tendency towards overthinking hadn’t been the metaphorical fox in my tuck box ever since boarding-school days. I began to think about the summer of my twelfth year, when my friend Charlie was having a birthday party, one component of which was an afternoon spent at the public swimming baths. I had a crush on one attendee, a girl called Angela Rogers. We all had a good time splashing around, Angela included, and then some gung-ho friend of Charlie’s suggested we boys take turns jumping off the top diving board. I should emphasise that no one was talking about diving off the board, just jumping; bombing as we called it. Gung-Ho was the first to go, teetering on the edge of the board’s mottled white tongue, the thing sending him into the air with such a sharp upward flick that I remember thinking it (the tongue) was revolted by his courage, just as I was, and he came crashing down into the silky green skin of the pool hugging his knees, causing that skin to bust and foam. And, one by one, the other eleven boys went up to the diving board, and did the same, squealing with delight, one even having the nerve to dive, Counsellor – dive! – until it was my turn. And I made it up the steps. And I made it onto the trafficked board. And I made it to the edge, smooth from all the feet that had paused there before. But then it happened. I made the mistake of pausing to think. I thought about the violence of the impact, the possibility the water would flood up into my nose, sweep through my brain. What if I somehow did it (the jumping) wrong, differently somehow to the other boys, so that I went straight to the bottom, broke my legs, and the water with that way it has of repairing its own surface took me in and never gave me back, and as I stood thinking about this, the other boys jeering below, the tiny Angela Rogers sidling up beside the sinewy stick-man that was Gung-Ho, I found I could not do it, could not do it all, was frozen, could not move, shame burning my brain, ruining this playful day I had so looked forward to for weeks, and I’ll tell you, shall I, the strangest thing: when I bumped into Gung-Ho a decade later, at a fund-raiser in a barn that smelt of soap, still sinewy but with more fear in his face, he did not remember that day at all. He did not remember it at all.
13 And in fact Beverley also said – and you might be interested in this, Counsellor – that she wished more fiction addressed these local concerns. She has a bit much of a pet hatred – a touch unfair, I think, though as you know I’m not much of a fiction man – of the same literary tropes being recycled by writers over and over. Tropes such as, let me think, she listed seven, yes, seven…Number one was little-known wars in distant lands. That’s right. Opening: period detail and hints of a cross-cultural inter-generational love affair that transcends the contingent concerns of race and religion, time and space. Middle bit: guns and memories. End: stunning revelation that, ultimately, all war is unpleasant. Trope two was Man’s epic gap-year-esque journey to find himself, and lose himself, preferably at the same time, in a much-ignored corner of the Commonwealth. Beverley explained that, in the eyes of prize committees, this type of fiction is much enhanced by colourful references to jams, chutneys and pickles, as well as the use of foreign words of great texture and rhythm, at all times without recourse to explanatory notes. Three was…no, no, four was…something to do with artistic types reconnecting with the world? Gone, sorry, the rest of them are gone. And. Where was I? Thursday. Thursday…
3.32 p.m.
SHE KNOWS how it began: the front of the bus colliding with the cab. And she recalls how it ended: climbing through glass, realising with indifference that the driver was dead. But running shoeless and shaky through New Change and Cheapside the experience is already unfastening itself from who she is, becoming part of the air passing through her hair. The crash might come back to her at some point, of course – she has learnt to anticipate the moment when past events return as strange, rousing gusts of memory, engulfing her sense of self, dragging small parts of her personality away – but for now the few images that glimmer in her mind have the feel of something indulgently decorative, irritatingly extraneous to the substance of her situation. Collapsed bodywork, reflections snagging in the metal’s depressions. Wheels spinning, light unscrolling around them. It is hard to focus on these details. She is alive. This is the key thing. Maybe she blacked out for a while. Maybe she didn’t. Difficult to remember with this curious gaseous pain in her head, a new unsteadying heaviness.
Must get clean. No Dennis. No police. Need a Plan B.
Trouble is, the Heath was her Plan B. Suicide was never the Plan A. It’s the thing she kept for the rainiest day; the comforting shadow, always trailing behind, forever there to fall back on. You’ve been told by a grief counsellor that you need to give traumas five years to heal, so you wait five years, still seeing the counsellor now and then, less and less, demeaned by your need to buy empathy, and when half a decade has gone and your pain gnaws even deeper than before that shadow is still there, dark and simple, more appealing than ever. She needs a Plan C, and who in their right mind has one of those?
She stops outside a dry-cleaner’s to catch her breath, that shadow of hers settling against a Credit-Crunch Special poster. In the cut-glass British bank opposite a lift falls softly from floor to floor. She sees a tramp approaching her on the zebra crossing which rolls out, like a tasteless eighties carpet, from the bank’s electric doors. He is huge-haired and filthy, powdery bruises lurking where stubble meets cheeks, neck and forehead wearing that sailor’s tan you get from living beyond borders. There is a way of walking through this part of London he has not learnt: purposeful, harassed. He is stagger-swaying in his own unprepared way, looking for someone to address, and he chooses her.
Losing saliva between words he says, ‘This is my spot lady,’ and after waiting a beat starts laughing hard, his breath full of excrement. When the laughter stops as abruptly as it began he gives her a clean bare stare, a look that’s uncluttered by background facts. Here she is, a woman in expensive ruined clothes, he does not care how or why.
She runs. A scene swims up from a puddle she passes: driver in seat, sagged, rag-dolled, eyes blank, single eyebrow a dead beast above. Under the rear-view mirror, a cardboard air-freshener in the shape of a Christmas tree. Everything glass-sharded, glittering away, his blood adding colour, the whole mangled vehicle looking faintly festive. God has an eye for the absurd.
For a moment, as she backed away from him, as she began running from the pristinely twisted metal, a savage structure full of gaps and bends and breaks, leaving
the second car upturned, wheels still spinning, head hurting but body working (working!), she felt an unfamiliar sensation: gratitude.
The security guard at the Service & Deliveries Entrance sees her coming. He starts with her muddied tights and scans upward, eyeing every stain and missing button. In her more serious smoking days she used to stand and examine him, and he in turn would be examining newly arrived packages. She has noticed that he likes to find the imperfections in a thing, the nick on a corner or suspicious extra weight.
‘Miss Stephens,’ he says.
‘Hi,’ she says, smiling.
‘You look…’ he begins.
‘Yes?’
‘Different. Is everything OK?’
His walkie-talkie sputters to life: Police have cordoned off New Change; your three thirty’s running late.
She decides to respond with a lie: ‘Afraid I’ve left my security pass in the gym.’
‘In the gym?’
‘Gym changing rooms, yes. Whole handbag there, in fact. So if you could wave me through I’ll wander down, into the goods bay bit, get to the gym through there.’
‘Everything’s OK, then. You just need your handbag.’
He is patient and measured. Some of the neat weightiness of boxed stock has pressed its way into his being.
‘Everything’s fine, I promise. And if you let me in I’d avoid walking through reception with this drowned slut look I’ve got going.’
When he smiles his features lose shape, melt into the excitable boy she feels he used to be. He rummages in his pocket. She half expects him to pull out a conker.