by Jonathan Lee
And if Joy perceives anything at all, unconscious on the floor, forced inwards by the impact, it is some runny-coloured scene from the past.
The time on the first Tube of a Tuesday, maybe, when a shambling bald man in a comedy coat looked at her, a look too long and eager. When she realised he was wanking (wanking!) her shocked hand threw coffee on his crotch and caused the tramp to recoil with a whimper-sob which, as it expanded in the otherwise empty carriage, made her feel like the worst kind of woman in the world.
Or Wimbledon. She may see that. The scene she’s edited and improved in the cutting room of her mind so many times but which now and then, like a botched punchline, comes out its own way, refusing to be shaped.
There is a long queue for the ladies’ lavatory. She has to take him to the ladies’ lavatory. Too small to go to the men’s on his own.
In the line there are sun hats. Flip-flops. The occasional cagoule.
Joy is holding him in her arms. Smell of sugar, wet wipes, factor 50. Getting heavy to carry so she sets him down.
The stretch of queue behind them becomes longer and thinner. The tract in front becomes short and fat. Someone sighs. A woman looks at her watch. People take sidesteps and discuss the weather. It is raining but they are sheltered. They discuss rain. A radio clears its throat.
At first she ignores him, the stranger who has appeared at her side. He is standing too close. It is irritating. But if you mention these things you can create a scene. She shuffles to her left, holding her nephew’s hand.
The stranger leans into her ear. ‘Gimme your money or the kid gets it.’
Back straightens. Grip on child tightens. But when she swivels she sees, not a stranger, but Peter.
‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘just a little joke.’
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
‘Client do. Did I not mention?’
‘You know very well you didn’t mention.’
‘You’re here with…’
‘Yes, your wife.’
‘Well I definitely mentioned it to one of you.’
She looks down and sees the child jigging his leg. Sure sign he can’t hold on much longer. Red light on her BlackBerry pulsing.
‘Don’t mind me, I’m in no hurry to get back to those Big Four fuckers.’
She strokes the rollerball. Sighs. Needed in the office tonight.
‘Gorgeous, you need to relax,’ he says, shouldering his way into the queue, hugging her from behind. She feels his hot breath in her ear.
‘Stop, he might mention to you-know-who.’
Lets go of her nephew’s hand now. Now or later. Lets go.
‘A spy in our midst? Poor little tyke looks more concerned with pissing himself.’
Only seven or eight people ahead of them now. Only seven or eight as he slips his hand inside her summer jacket. Six or seven as under cover of cotton he feeds his fingers, cold at first, past her belt buckle and into her knickers, all these oblivious people huddled around them, wide-rimmed hats shading his movements from view.
‘Cut it out,’ she says, ‘Christine could walk past.’
The boy touching a dent in the wall. Hint of sister’s disapproving curl in his lip. Should stop him playing with chocolate wrappers by the wall.
She can feel her knickers soaking through and his stubble on her neck and people’s shadows dappling the ground around them and his fingertip in the right place.
Feels something brushing her ankle. Ignores it. Nephew within reach, looks and sees him distracted with the wrappers, within reach, and she is losing herself in pleasure.
Body beginning to tense, anticipating orgasm. Would only take a few minutes more. Has to concentrate with all the concentration she’s got not to sigh and submit. Enough, this is silly, enough, stop it. Pulls Peter’s hand out into the open.
Then she looks to her left, and her right, and swallows, and repeats the movements, and the child is gone.
But first she looked and saw him playing with the wrappers and thought a good auntie wouldn’t let him touch litter and sensed Peter’s hand slipping down there.
Then she felt a shiver building and looked left and he wasn’t there.
And the way she swallowed and did a pirouette and couldn’t see him.
But before all that she let go of the boy’s hand and told Peter Stop It.
She said Stop It and ended the pleasure even though she’d been babysitting for the last two days and having sometimes dull dates with Dennis and deserved a second’s release.
But first the child was jigging his leg and the BlackBerry was flashing and she checked an email.
Then she looked to the wall and thought of how he’d inherited that curl in his lip.
Looked to the wall and he wasn’t there and she was left with the weak feeling Peter was playing a joke.
But first Peter was pressed into her back with his fingers in her knickers and why would she let him do that when the boy was near?
And as she runs up and down the line moving in an abstract unstructured way breathing with awful desperate effort she goes through each link in the chain of events but cannot make them properly cohere.
Peter making her pause for a second says, ‘It’ll get out we were cosy, say I just arrived, saw you running.’
He gets her to repeat it, like she’s the child, like it’s the important lesson of the day: ‘Say you just arrived, saw me running.’
‘It will be OK,’ he says, ‘you go there, me here, bugger won’t have tottered far.’
Just arrived, saw me running. Just arrived, saw me running. A statement strung into the chain of events, becoming fact. He just arrived and saw me running.
Some of the words she might or might not hear, lying in this building, face down on the stone.
Dennis
I HAVEN’T seen you for a while, Counsellor, but actually it has been rather a good few weeks, both on the university front and the cerebral-but-nonetheless-highly-commercial book front, yes, really rather a good few weeks on both fronts, I was thinking that in the hospital today, sitting in her new room, really quite positive, things as they say coming together, and in truth, though I shouldn’t admit it, just being in the hospital day after day, seeing Joy-Joy lying there with the tube for fluids and nutrients, and the ventilator machine wheezing, the tube in the windpipe lifting the lungs, the contortionately polite professionals pricking her skin, moving her minutely to avoid bed sores, checking Do I need tea, asking Do I want a custard cream (no Jaffas, Counsellor, sadly no no no), just all of that makes me pleased with my own body’s elastic power, its stubborn self-sufficiency, the obstinate miracle of its working.
The blankness in her face is the only upsetting thing. Awful and vacant, like a tragedy mask. But I am feeling positive. The people with printouts and clipboards say fifty–fifty. When is any chance better than fifty–fifty?
Yes. Exactly. Yes.
Her face is like a mask now, but even giving the speech it seemed somehow alien. The microphone came alive in a hailstorm of spittle. She squinted down at us, stammering as she spoke, imprecise with her words, more like me than her. Something in her eyes looked surprised by the nonsensical story coming from her lips, and I’d only seen her like that once before, only once before had I seen her features hold that unleashed look you get when the cupboard is being cleared, the cupboard in the back of your brain, the one full of secrets and corpses.21 Her make-up looked thick and strange, a Tim Burton version of her everyday self. Yet she was Joy-Joy. She was my wife. Five foot nine, long slim limbs, a careful smoothness to her neck and chest, quick to smile but slow to laugh, keener on a good chicken sandwich than a Michelin-starred supper, beautiful, faithful, unfaithful, kind, cruel, a secret reader of trashy magazines, an unashamed follower of Fashion. A person who became depressed.
The new room? Oh, very nice, yes, thank you, and I fought hard
to get her moved to that room, it’s one of the reasons I’m so upbeat. A good view from the window. I’m often looking out of that window. Sky moves through a tree. Clouds pucker here and there. The ventilator hisses and her stretched chest lifts. When I think of my mother, long dead now, it is in a room like this, sleepy and clean, lying still, wearing blue. If someone vanishes you dress your memory of them, don’t you? Imagine where they’d be, construct details to fill the gaps, make the image less abstract. Sometimes I wander away from her, from Joy-Joy, into another wing of the hospital, to give others a chance to visit, and I pace around, texting myself thoughts. There’s a noticeboard under a skylight in one corridor, and it’s headed ‘Have You Seen Any of These People?’, and beneath that question is a confused reverie of faces, patchworked photographs of people who, by virtue of some illness, accident or escape, have been reported lost; so many of the pictures blurry or faded beyond their age. Impossible not to look at that noticeboard. It fixes you to the floor. The sheer variety of faces and trivia. All the ways you can be missing and missed.
Beg your pardon?
Probably. Probably Joy-Joy is peaceful, comfortable. She looks peaceful but you cannot really tell. It never was easy to reach the reality of my wife. Things you thought you knew about her would vanish in an instant, as if never really there. Her perceptions of herself and others were always (I’d say) in flight, in flux, and it was true even of her father, the man she loved most in the world, she would constantly reinvent him, scrub him out and start again, long after he was dead. He worked in bars, first in America and then in England – a sarcastic old chap, by all accounts, funny but not friendly, a terrible gambler, wooed Joy’s rich mother with a brand of cool, almost cold, charisma. Joy-Joy herself spoke of him this way for a while, but as time gave her distance from his death she made him a minor god, forgot his gambling debts, described him as warm and welcoming, a tragic figure who would never have killed himself but for the cancer. She liked to recreate people according to some private ambition of her own, and as her ambition changed, as her standards shifted, so did that person. But it was all down to the pursuit of perfection, you understand. A restlessness with the plain grey truth: that was her only flaw.
There’s a man down the corridor who sobs and gurgles a lot. Sometimes when the nurse goes in she wakes him (I think) from a vast dream, because he doesn’t seem to know what’s going on, or where he is, and cries out What The Fuck?, or on occasion, when confusion puts a pause in his thoughts, What The Fu—? But it’s better to listen to his swearing than his sobbing. Better his life be an interrupted obscenity than one long sob.
In the months after Wimbledon she seemed to be growing stronger, more determined to find the boy than ever. She said she could hear his voice in her head, urging her on. Of course she would get upset if we spent a weekend pursuing a tip-off that came to nothing, wandering through a Gypsy camp in Cyprus and realising this woman wanted to sell us her baby, of course she would cry then, but in general she was continuing with the search, following up on sightings and leads, staying in hotels all over Europe, searching sometimes with me, sometimes with journalists, never with her sister, often alone. She got pregnant, we got married, she looked set to get stronger and stronger, and then a week or two after the ceremony, only a week or two, she decided she could not bear to have a child after all, for what if she proved careless again, and I tried to persuade her, tried to tell her it was my last chance at fatherhood, and her doctor convinced her to think it over for a while, suspected she might merely have been going through a phase (for you medical types everything’s a phase, is it not, ha ha, you’ve seen so much of life), but her mind was made up, and I realised I’d never be what I thought I’d always be, which is a – please don’t laugh – a family man.
I prefer to be alone with Joy-Joy, but often Annie arrives. It is good that she comes but suddenly I feel the need to, yes, to perform a little. I realise it is not enough to sit there slumped, considering the sky and the tree. The room is so clean and pristine, has such a finished feel, that it seems rude not to act dead in it, but with Annie there everything acquires the air of some auspicious entertainment, and I must haul myself out of nothingness and partake in the show. She wants to look at photographs, for example, and discuss them, which is sweet. I can show you pictures of her with my son, Annie said this morning. Pictures of the two of them together before he went missing. You probably don’t want to see the pictures but they are here, Dennis, photos of Joy and my son, if you’d like to see.
They found a note, you know. From the pocket of her favourite skirt, bundled into a plastic bag in her office, inexplicably muddied, and the police have shared it with me (the note) for it is addressed to me, it is a note for me, it is mine, one of the things that has been left behind, and her colleagues visit, and my cousins visit, and they all tell me that it will be fine, and they are so quick to say this, to deliver elegantly choreographed little lectures on life, and I wonder, why didn’t anyone say, on my wedding day, why didn’t anyone say to me, Dennis, old Dennis, Dennis old boy, there’s a problem here, a real problem, and the problem is this: she doesn’t love you, it’s plain she doesn’t love you. She. Does not. Love you. If I say the words out loud they arrive like that, not long but short, and it feels just right, it feels just about right, just about true, and it must be true, mustn’t it? Because you can cheat on a person but still love them, maybe, possibly, perhaps, but you can’t love them and want to take your life, wreck their life, can you? I consider these questions as part of the constant background battle of whose fault is it and why has this happened. The days fade down to a drowsy flicker behind my eyes.
Annie was right. I did not want to see her fucking pictures.
Sorry.
Sorry?
Oh do not misunderstand me Counsellor! I am feeling positive. I am content. I have friends. And I got that literary agent I always wanted.
The so-called Abby Aardvark! Indeed. Yes, yes.
She says the market is…I believe the word she used was terrible…but that if I make a few small changes (like taking the whole thing out of iambic pentameter, and applying a scalpel to the overwritten bits22), that if I make these changes the book could be a reasonable prospect for some small imprint trying to prove there is more to books than ghostwritten memoirs of gravity-defying surgery on bottoms or breasts.
Well, yes. The book may bring in some money but actually all that (the financial side of my life) is, ha, less pressing now. The student who filed a complaint against me is currently in the midst of her own disciplinary process. It seems that in pursuit of the not-all-that-objectionable aim of ending factory farming she joined an objectionably aggressive march through London, a march partly inspired by the poultry revelations in the press these last few weeks, a march which appears to have ended abruptly on the outskirts of Peckham when she paused to assault a surprisingly thin kebab-shop owner. She denied all involvement when the police came calling, but CCTV footage clearly shows her and a more muscular acquaintance jumping over napkin holders and trays of soggy salad, approaching the vertical spinning griller on which a glossy grey leg of sweating doner rotated, freeing a great flap of rubbery meat from said sweaty leg with a machete-like instrument, and beating the poor floored Turk around the cheeks with it (facial cheeks, initially). When that event came to light she became rather less crazed in her pursuit of my career, and her father coincidentally – ha ha – declared his intention to stand down from the Board of Governors. Too busy with his charity commitments, he said. The committee has cleared me of all charges. I start back on, yes, on Monday. Ha ha ha. You have to laugh, don’t you, when people get their comeuppance?
Don’t you agree, though?
Don’t you like to see the sinners punished, the righteous saved?
I do not believe you. Ha! I simply do not, Counsellor. Because for all of us that’s the most grimly satisfying thing, I think, in any story, ha, it really is, it makes us w
ho we are, yes, sorry, did you say something?
Oh forgive me, ha, I was chuckling so hard, I thought you said something. I feel you have seen the best and worst of me and yet, and yet, you remain so opaque…But then does anyone really know all that much about you, do you even know that much about you? I wonder whether you spend so much time in other people’s heads you lose, from time to time, a sense of who you are?
Really?
Oh good.
That is good, and I thank you, I will have some water, water would be lovely, that is better, that is better, I thank you kindly for your concern. And I should make sure I enjoy these refreshments, actually, because this will be the last time I come here.
At your clinic? Ha ha, no no, that will not be necessary, thank you. I think I now know as much about my feelings, my internal workings, as I want to know, yes, and obviously there are still things I don’t understand, for example, for example, I’m not sure I’ll ever understand – ha ha, you have to laugh, it’s so slapstick, the whole thing – why she did it there, in front of so many people. Without the note I would not believe it, the note and the pile of papers on the dresser, the columns and rows of facts, sort codes and phone numbers that go on and on and on without pause, would not believe she’d thrown herself off there deliberately, would not wonder why I stayed silent that Friday morning when I sensed something strange, ha, why I did not get out of bed but instead lay there, on my side, facing the wall, ha, why I didn’t run downstairs after her but instead lay listening to the footsteps, loud then quiet down the stairs, ha ha, the key-jangle and the zipping sound from her bag and the nothing which followed as her body blended with the city, the bedroom…the whole house we shared…shaking with cars heading to Upper Street and Essex Road. Do you know why I didn’t say anything to stop her? You’ll tell me, Counsellor, won’t you, if you find out? A bad time for me to have been lost for words, no? Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.