Joy

by Jonathan Lee

  Joy opens her mouth to try and say she has to go, emergency at home, can’t stay, but the powers of expression that have served her here for a decade are vanishing in her mind’s lowering light.

  ‘Brian’ll be all over the Health and Safety boys,’ Charles says, ‘whatever warfare’s necessary, his weapon in their faces. And quite right too. They want to build a taller railing on those viewing platforms, like we’re all a bunch of mal-coordinated clowns. Well, that’s all well and good, there are indeed some clowns here and there’ – he flicks a quick thumb in Brian’s direction – ‘but we need the platform today, don’t we? And everything’s fine, all perfectly safe. There’s too much Health and Safety round here. And too many well-adjusted people. Well-adjusted people will ruin professional services in this country. Isn’t that right, Brian?’

  ‘Remind me of the agenda,’ says Brian.

  ‘Well, Brian, there’s no agenda as such, it’s not an agenda sort of thing now, is it? But, roughly speaking, I’ll say a few words to introduce Joy, then Joy can speak for as long as she likes re how made up she is about being made up, and then old Jonesy from Corporate can introduce his two new monkeys.’

  ‘Corporate might want to go first? Engine of the, ah, firm?’

  ‘Nonsense, Brian. This is the post-downturn world. It’s the young contentious and insolvency stars who are the future. Joy here, closely followed by the likes of Perfect-Eyes Peter, then that girl with the mole who always smells of mint, they’re the new leaders.’

  Perfect-Eyes Peter? She is wondering why until now she’s never been privy to that nickname as Charles and Brian, ignoring her inarticulate excuses, sun setting behind and around them like a controlled explosion, lead her down the remaining step, past the Cypriot tailor’s and the creepy-kitsch card shop, over a trampled Evening Standard predicting the end of the world and a B-list divorce, to within view of the Japanese water garden, its six bamboo fountains and staggered granite stepping stones, and finally the great dustless revolving door of Hanger, Slyde & Stein.

  Dennis

  BIRDS IN flight are not in a space between Place A and Place B, but instead carry Place A and Place B and Place C and Place D and all the other places they have flown or will fly with them, as part of them, in flight, for they live in the sky, the inbetweenness of travel gives a clue to their being, the flying itself is who they are, at least that is – crudely put – what the architect Vincenzo Volentiri argues, and his point is a rather beautiful one I think, though only tangentially relevant to this thing I’m about to tell you, which pertains to the relationship I have with my wife, and pertains also to what happened on that Thursday night before her accident (the night that started with the wine and the weights and which that racket-pincher Peter interrupted), and it’s going to sound strange even to someone who has heard the things you must have heard, but what I would like you to bear in mind, to bear in your open medical mind, is this: a couple, a man and a woman,14 can get used to slash habituated to slash accustomed to anything. People can become familiar with torture, for example. People can come to love hot wax and hostage-takers. People can, in really quite surprising numbers, decide that the best way to spend their weekends is in the company of whips and chains, ball gags, muzzle gags, slave hoods, gimp masks, punishment canes, a range of male and female Gorean-style slave restraints, penis restraints, vaginal restraints, punishment implements, whips, floggers, paddles, straps, belts, rattan Koboo public-school disciplinarian cane sets, wases, floggers – did I already say floggers? – Spanker Sausage™, steel fetters, lockable male and female climax-denial devices, penis pinchers, pussy poppers, testicle ticklers, asylum slash military slash religious zealot pattern discipline thongs, straitjackets, medieval massage maimers, futuristic things they’ve not yet named – can decide they wish to be in the company of such things, on a given weekend, in London’s vibrant Vauxhall. All I’m saying is that the human mind, given time, has a great capacity for embracing the strange.

  It15 starts with a tiny nearly normal thing and ripples out from there. Perhaps you haven’t made love to your wife for a while. Things have gone off the proverbial boil. Sex, in the language of women’s magazines left lying, spine-strained, around your constantly redecorated home,16 lacks a certain sparkle. Maybe there’s an incident in your wife’s past that means lovemaking has ceased to bring her much happiness. Some deep evolutionary need to go through the motions of reproduction has crumbled under a weighty sense of despair at what those motions mean in modern life – when you may not have time to care for your child; when your child, growing old, may not have time to care for you; when, even if everybody has time, all the time in the world, some cruel external force may interfere. So one night, after a few drinks, maybe seven, certainly more than five, in tacit acknowledgement of your need for intimacy, and the lack of sparkle and boil, you suggest to her that you watch a DVD, and that – consistent with tip number 5 in the 10 Quick Marriage Menders piece you perused – the DVD be of a softly pornographic nature, be in fact a DVD you happen to own, a DVD called Chalet Girl’s Erotic Avalanche, a DVD which you have hitherto kept covered by sports socks and gleaming white boxers unwittingly arranged into a drawer-sized version of an actual avalanche, a DVD showcasing Chalet Girl’s ladybits but also (for this is to be a shared experience) some willies. And that (the watching and subsequent intercourse et cetera) goes well, pretty well, and for the next time, in advance, you procure from one of your bearded PhD students a small bag of cocaine, something you and your wife haven’t done together for years (snort cocaine, that is, though with sex it’s also been a while), and you have some of this cocaine together, in front of the DVD, just enough to put you at a nice elegant remove from reality, and that (the subsequent intercourse) goes well, really pretty well indeed, and so when several weeks later you bring out the remaining cocaine at a small party with close friends, and things have become somewhat jokey and lewd, and there are only four of you left in the room, and the other man’s wife – looking not unpleasant in the druggy moonlight – has her hand on your thigh, and you look up to see her husband’s lips on your wife’s shoulder, one shoulder of the pair of shoulders you’ve always meant to tell her you love, you don’t overly mind, for it is small fry compared to the contact you’ve seen on screen, and your wife says let’s call it a night this is getting weird, and you call it a night but – but – feel somewhat disappointed, feel, in addition, surprised by your own disappointment and amazed by your own surprisedness, for this is a time in your life when surprise seemed a thing you could not feel. Months pass. You start to buy a little more cocaine from the PhD student. And long before you tire of the coke, long long before the CAUB moans in one-on-one feedback sessions that you’re the only tutor who gives her 2:2s (could you please reconsider; you’d really better reconsider), long long long before the CAUB goes to the Dean of the Arts Faculty to complain of sexually inappropriate comments and gropings (comments you know were not uttered and gropings you know were not…groped), long long long long before the CAUB throws in for good measure her suspicions that you have been engaged in on-campus drug deals, long long long long long before you are suspended pending completion of the university’s investigations, long long long long long long before your daily life becomes a series of small lies to conceal this professional catastrophe from your young wife – long before all this, you have one night when the four of you17 go a little further. And when, several mornings hence, you and your young wife sit up in bed, and talk about how this has to stop, not necessarily because it is unpleasant in principle but because it is making everyday contact with Brenda and Anthony rather awkward – at the supermarket, at the Islington Farmers’ Market – well, when this happens, you start to consider your options.

  What I’m saying is, we had call girls every Thursday. The words Which girl shall we order in for tonight? became as normal as Do you have cash for the cleaner?18

  Anyway, judge us if you will, Counsellor, but my wif
e and I are, in my opinion, only slightly left of normal. The little pacts and betrayals one’s relationship absorbs are only unthinkable or upsetting when compared to the perfect vision of an uncluttered relationship one has at the very outset (of the relationship). Did I imagine, when a mutual friend first set me up on a dinner date with Joy, explained how successful she was in her legal career, explained how until recently she’d been mixed up in a relationship with all sorts of complications but now wanted to fall in love, clean and pure, did I for one moment imagine that we would one day be reliant on the paid services of a sex professional to keep our passion for one another alive? No. No, Counsellor, I did not. But then nor did I envisage that she would become pregnant, and that without a second thought I’d offer to do the right thing, and that after seemingly endless thought, as I stared at ducks paddling the canal, she’d say OK, why not, and that as I looked back over my left shoulder shortly thereafter I would see her in white, dappled with light from the high windows, looking barely real, a smile driving her dimples into delicate shadow.

  We had a call girl arrive that Thursday night. Joy-Joy wasn’t in the mood. We sent the girl home. I don’t think that could have overly unsettled my wife, given it was a pretty much weekly occurrence, do you? Certainly after the girl left everything was very ordinary; we had some wine which I feared might be corked but was not, and I nearly mentioned the Peter visit but didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of causing us yet another argument, and we went to bed, and woke up on what seemed to be an average Friday, clouds in a knotted posture filling the morning sky, the sun a clementine, no, a tangerine, no, a satsuma hanging low, and I watched her organising some papers at the dresser as I lay half wrapped in my hangover, eyeballs pulsing in time with my heart.

  You’re asking…?

  Yes, I see. Well, Counsellor, I say an average Friday morning, but I would add…yes, that she was tearful and affectionate. Careful, I suppose, to leave all our bank statements in five neat piles, organised into current accounts and ISAs. Slow and showy, now I think, in the way she said she loved me, said I love you, often said those three words to me – perhaps you’re surprised? – though of course she usually said them (the words I love you) in the quick snatched way hurried couples do, Joy-Joy in particular being a person who employed the same brusque rat-a-tat tone whenever she talked, delivering life-changing eulogies with the speed of takeaway orders. She could dismiss philosophies, order furniture and book a first-class flight in the time it takes me to swallow my own spit, really she could, but that morning, that last morning, she didn’t speak so fast, she was different, her I and love and you were more spaced and languid, so perhaps, yes perhaps, I should have known.

  I notice I am in the past tense once again. Funny, isn’t it, how the literary times are a changing, how it (the past) is no longer the writer’s tense of choice – take Beverley Badger’s work, pour example – and I’d say that despite a few stubborn memories holding her back Joy is by nature a present-tense kind of person, yes, snappy, headlong, with an irresistible forward tilt, hardly touched by time, whereas I’m all about the past these days, the past which never stops happening, treading through its waters with decreasing pace, dragging my legs like lead weights.

  I was going to tell you about my impending disciplinary hearing at the university, and the fact that the female student who has been causing me all these issues has been in the press this last week following a somewhat inelegant incident in Peckham, and that particular stopping-off point in the story, that proverbial narrative service station, that definitely has a place along the, er, motorway of who I am, which I suppose is what these sessions are intended to explore (the question of who I am), but the thing I really want to get on and talk about is the police arriving at my door on Friday afternoon. They were waving Joy-Joy’s driving licence. Asking me to confirm my address was her address. Asking me had I heard from her, telling me not to be alarmed, holding her handbag which I noted was newly adorned with complex shards of glass, telling me that she had been in an accident and was missing, missing, a strange word that seems to evoke the mystical, which seems to be within yet beyond experience, the way missing people are, a missing person is, the police call them mispers, did you know that, missing persons become mispers in police-speak, on police papers, one word, like childcare, mispers. Joy hated it, the fact the world saw fit to abbreviate such a thing, to steal a space and half the letters from a phrase – missing persons – that already felt false.

  I will tell you about that, and my journey in the police car to her office, and my phone call to Joy-Joy’s sister Annie, if you would like to hear it?

  Thank you, Counsellor. You are an open-minded and attentive auditor. As one might expect, I suppose, from one who mingles art and science. You’d be the perfect reader for my new book, I think. If I ever get it published. If Beverley Badger’s agent ever gets back to me.

  Skip Notes

  14 Or man and man, in these enlightened times. Woman and woman, even.

  15 i.e. the pattern of events leading to habitualised strangenesses.

  16 By way of hint?

  17 You, your wife, your wife’s friend, and your wife’s friend’s husband (as hitherto mentioned).

  18 And actually, Counsellor – a side thought of sorts – I wonder whether this phenomena of strange discourse becoming, through usage, akin to everyday discourse hasn’t got something to do with the inherent strangeness of all language? I am thinking once again of Othello and in particular the greatest of Shakespeare’s verbal tacticians, Iago, who recognises that if it is natural that one should demonstrate the native act and figure of one’s heart in complement extern it is also natural that such a demonstration distort what is contained in the heart, that all acts of naming, of assimilating things into a system of language, may involve labelling that thing in terms of something other than itself, alienating it from its unspeakable individuality, and that this is one form of the differentiating or stepping aside which all use of language entails, don’t you think, Counsellor?

  4.48 p.m.

  SHE FEELS a curious detachment from the crisp, alert office workers filling out the ground-floor function space – the niceties they exchange reach her only remotely, the vague babble of voices at the edge of a dream – but the cold walk around the building seems to have done her good: that thunderous headache has settled in her ears as a background hum.

  ‘Must freshen up,’ she tells them as they pass through the security barriers, grateful her own words sound sensible.

  ‘Have to be quick,’ says Charles. There’s something tyrannical in his tone that makes Joy want to please him. ‘We’ll see you up there.’

  ‘See you up there,’ confirms Brian.

  The grids of champagne glasses look gimmicky but brilliant, sharp and shiny in their lines. There are canapés waiting on the side tables too, appearing fresh and alluring while nonetheless having something about them which suggests fakery: bruschetta should not be that size, and who in the real world would eat hoisin duck from a lettuce cup? But these perishables have all been laid out for her speech, along with branded water and pulpless juice, and as she walks into the ladies’ loos she begins to think it’s best to deliver the spiel and sign the forms, for is the partnership realistically going to insist on her paying in the capital contribution straight away? Even if they do, which increasingly she thinks they won’t, will the firm really make life difficult for Dennis after she dies? There’s probably a good spouse-friendly life-assurance policy in place once you make partner – though she’d need to check for carve-outs in relation to suicide – so where’s the rush to die today?

  She sits on the toilet, wondering if other suicidal people go through these farces of indecision. Adrift in a sea of variables: this must be how Dennis feels every day. She should go to the police. Technically she fled the scene of an accident. As soon as the speech is done, if she does it, she s
hould take herself to the nearest police station. Did she actually throw the BlackBerry at the perspex before they crashed, or did it fly out of her hand during the crash, or did it not leave her hand until much later? She wasn’t aware of any drama involving the BlackBerry until she found herself telling Barbara about it in the changing rooms. If you’ve had a trauma your perceptions get muddled, don’t they, so how do you decide what’s true and what’s not? She feels almost sure now – the post-credit-crunch toilet paper insists on dispensing itself one square at a time, which is irritating – sure that she had nothing to do with the driver’s death, has nothing to feel guilty about, it is him who nearly killed her, but all sorts of thoughts are thrashing in her mind, probably must be (scrimping on loo roll!) the shock. The twenty-first of January. It had seemed the right date on which to take her life, and when the partnership promotions were scheduled for today too this struck her not as a coincidence but as a sign of some wider design. Any sense of structure is precious. She would take herself to the Heath, she would get this right. But did she not feel an odd elation, after the collision, at being able to flee that crumpled metal coffin, succeeding where the driver had failed?

  She hears someone walk into the lavatories. Flats not heels; you can tell from the lack of clack. A mobile goes, not the standard Hanger ringtone, and the woman says ‘Hello?’ with that air of faux surprise everyone has in their repertoire.

  With shoulders rolled Joy is staring at her own knee-slung knickers when the woman says, ‘Complete waste of time, security people just confirmed she’s here, you know what he’s like.’

  The voice is unmistakable, breathy and curt, but it cannot be.

  ‘PhD in panicking, that man, I’d forgotten. Apparently she’s being made up to partner, which I suppose was inevitable.’