Joy

by Jonathan Lee

  Skip Notes

  21 (The time I checked her phone – in the twenty-first century a person’s phone is the clearest window onto their soul, don’t you think, their messages, their pet names, their pictures, the SIM card that is a deeper form of truth – and asked her if she was sleeping with Peter.)

  22 Even though I can’t help thinking all writing is overwriting, Counsellor, for it’s hardly as if any book needs to be written, is required by the world.

  Untimed Fragment

  IN THE room people come and go, talking of television. Down the hall a person is practising the discrete arts of sighing and sobbing, slowly finding perfect pitch. The light soaking through Joy’s eyelids is a bulging blue. She feels a flannel on her face. She wants to open her eyes. She wants to keep them closed. Dad’s voice echoes in some lit bit of her brain: Go easy on yourself. Never good at taking his own advice, her dad. The great parental prerogative. Someone says urinalysis. Someone else says Narcan. Both young feminine voices, but croaky at the edges, a hint of the weary women they mustn’t become. There is the soft slosh of liquid in bags. The voices exchange views on whether the girl group that are still in the competition are a bunch of chavvy tramps with shit hair or whether in fact the black one can sing and it’s just bad luck that they’ve got the worst mentor. Her neck feels wrapped in another neck. She senses the ceiling is sinking. A machine beeps. Means she is alive. Never one for reality TV, but had a brief thing for hospital dramas. Fictions of disaster. Carefully crafted loss. Every day we invent the stories of our lives. Another machine noise, like a woo-wooh, a half-forgotten song stuck in her head. Feeling disembodied, her body a puppet for which she can’t quite reach the strings, but if she concentrates hard and harder still on lifting her lids the bulging blue takes on a green underglow, becomes a deep complex sea. Her sister had a favourite dolly she took everywhere. To the shops. To the beach. White hair. Unnatural tan. Sea-green eyes. She hears feet departing, then heavier steps coming close. A man’s breath, full of chewing gum and burnt toast, turns her forehead firm. The sensation tingles and mingles with the feeling of warm torchlight on her lids. Every other feeling bombed away. She imagines her own eyelashes, great lunar crescents, flitting open to give this guy the fright of his life, but the machine beep stays steady and the thought slithers away like a…no, nothing like a snake at all.

  * * *

  —

  Last week, you left your phone at home.

  And?

  Nothing.

  Frankly, Dennis, I’d prefer to talk about something, or else smoke in silence.

  You think they like me, your work colleagues?

  You were invited, you’re my husband, they like you.

  What about Peter?

  I’m going back in.

  Wait and I’ll go back in with you. Assuming you’d, yes, like me to.

  It’s not a question of what I’d like. Come back in if you’d like.

  Well, I’d like to if you’d like me to.

  Make your own decision, Dennis. You’ll find it refreshing.

  Is it just me or would you rather I went home?

  It’s completely your choice! Come back in if you think you’ve got more to say to the boring lawyers.

  You want me to leave.

  Come on.

  I’ll leave.

  Dennis, come on, that’s not what I’m saying.

  But it never is what you’re saying, is it? It’s the things you don’t say.

  * * *

  —

  In this room the air is thick like overstewed tea. Definitive moments swim through dreams and you lie here being tended to, shuffling through a pack of memories in your mind, a fat deck of days. And, if you realise anything at all, it’s that they can be dealt in any order; it makes no difference which order, or which voice; Lemme shuffle them this way; You may be the one to, yes, do the proverbial shuffling; Hi Miss Stephens no your shuffling is brilliant. The Sigh Sobber down the hall experiments with more bass and the odd gargled noun like Jesus or Essex. She misses his swearing days, where he’d shout Fuck! in surprise now and then. Once last spring she played Scrabble with Christine on a little travel set at the City Tennis Club, too tired to hit more balls. Christine tiled out a proper noun, a brand name, something like Pepsi, and Joy reminded her that only limited proper nouns are allowed, those determined by a limited word list drawing on the Collins dictionary, and Christine replied, a rare smug plumpness in her voice, that new rules actually came in three days ago, that the manufacturer is now allowing place names people names company names and brands, has actually rewritten the rule book to allow an element of popular culture into the game, and Joy, thinking of her childhood Scrabble battles, complete with cool milk and custard creams, of the way her mother would check the dictionary in cases of irrevocable family dispute, said out loud in a way that caused Christine to twitch: Fucking hell, people can’t keep changing the rules! The Sigh Sobber is no longer sighing or sobbing, certainly not swearing, just weeping with such a hushed sadness that…One of the female voices from before is back. Her perfume is overcooked. She says Doctor Chapman is there anything I can do to help, which, depending on the precise shape of her body language, could mean Doctor Chapman is there anything I can do to help and/or, concurrently or in the alternative, Doctor Chapman let’s have babies. In the silence Joy fancies she can sense the good doctor weighing this up, probably taking from the breast pocket of his white coat a rather expensive pen, giving the nurse the look of deep highly controlled concern all doctors come to master, glancing down at his clipboard while slowly introducing a tremor of disinterested thoughtfulness into his features (an equally important doctorly expression, adaptable to both patients and subordinates). No thank you, Nurse, nothing to do right now. What’s your view, Doctor? Hard to say. A three on the GCS. If she comes out of it, probably some damage. Visitors still waiting? Yes, Doctor, shall I bring them in?

  * * *

  —

  It’s over.

  I love you.

  You’re married.

  I love you.

  You’re married to Christine.

  And you, soon, to Dennis.

  It’s over.

  Is it mine?

  It’s his.

  Are you sure?

  It’s his.

  I love you.

  You love you.

  Yes, well, that’s true too.

  * * *

  —

  She can picture the room clearly now, can see it through the prison bars her own lashes make. The ceiling lowering slowly, as if this is the sea and she – bottom-dwelling in a place of great pressure – is gradually beginning to surface. Always wanted to be a mother. But what if she lost another young life? Maybe her dad thought she’d be OK without him. Maybe he had his own unknowable reasons. Maybe she can forgive him for going. Maybe maybe maybe. Her sister was out with Dad in the rain one Sunday. Didn’t take the favourite dolly. Worried it would get wet. Should have outgrown it by now, surely, but still worried it would get wet! Mum downstairs doing a roast, plates clinking in the kitchen. Joy hated the dolly because Annie loved it so much. Did not realise this then, that you can despise something just because another person loves it. Scent of roast chicken wafted up the stairs. Joy sneaked into her sister’s room. Took the dolly out of its box. Snapped one leg clean off. Sister, later, enraged, crying in the car, Mum wailing too, and after that the sad sound windscreen wipers make, rain stealing outlines from things. Annie wanted to know who had done it. But no one had done it. One of those things. And her shame for that mean deed has not lessened in the years since. It has grown deeper, cutting a groove within which her wider need for forgiveness sits.

  * * *

  —

  Auntie Joy, why is Cretine with us?

  Christine!

  Why is she with us?
<
br />   She’s my friend, sweetie.

  Why?

  Because she is, she’s my friend.

  Why?

  She does nice things, like giving us these strawberries.

  You’re my friend, Auntie Joy.

  Don’t eat the green bit.

  Why are you smiling, Auntie Joy?

  Because I’m happy.

  Why?

  Because I love you.

  Why?

  * * *

  —

  Nothing to do right now. Listen, just listen. She listens for the Sigh Sobber Turned Weeper, but there is no fresh sound coming from him, only the afterhum of the noise he once made, and other voices stirring within that hum, shapeless and strange. Perhaps there are always gaps in the way we feel. Perhaps happiness is best kept as a side effect. Perhaps people swallow fictions quicker than facts. Perhaps perhaps perhaps perhaps. The ceiling like a bright hydraulic stage comes lower, lower still. Lies catch a current, find a life of their own. She is floating upwards, feels her lashes getting loose with stinging salt. Her limbs twitch. Machine beeps cluster. Feeling light, lighter, like a bag catching a current, plastic but alive, floating to meet the stage halfway. In heavy supportive water with the surface coming soon she is not sure if her body struggles to get out or to stay in. Part of her, dead tired, wants to disappear down here, find Ben – there, done, she has named him, Ben – and all the other vanished children here and there, sinking or floating in the gossamer light, waving or drowning, happy or sad, find them drifting in timeless places, dark spaces deeper than death. Through walls come the words What the fuck? – the Sigh Sobber lives! – and she tries to summon some of his energy, energy and imagination, qualities which save few lives but on which she relies, for they bring something of the world’s colour into being, a consolation prize of a kind, and she must not fall asleep, not now, just must not sleep.

  Peter

  Dear Doctor Odd,

  It has been several months since we discussed the side benefits of elastic bands. Months in which you seem to have lost interest in the City’s occupational health. But, if my sources are correct, you still deal in paper, so I’ve enclosed a little gift with this note.

  That’s the last of my stash of Hanger-branded office supplies. As you probably guessed when I stopped turning up for our little chats, I am no longer in active employment there. Bananagate, I must report, did not go down well. And although I despise half the people I worked with, I miss the firm a little more than I thought I would. In this flat the days are grey. Cloud grey. Whale grey. Dirty tea towel. Aged paper. In France, to be ‘grey’ (être gris) means to be drunk. And to be extremely drunk? That’s to be ‘black’ (être noir). Did you know that, at all?

  I am a little drunk, writing this. I have found it helpful of late to be a little drunk at all times.

  We get used to repetition, don’t we? It provides a framework. The documents I’d draft when a company had gone into admin, the witness statements and the notices, they’d all be adaptations of something done before. I’d find pro forma templates wherever I turned. There were times when I felt all of us at the firm existed in a kind of template. The things we said and did had a recycled quality to them. We said them and did them in a dead, duplicated way. Unique things were welcomed at Hanger’s, but they had to be uniformly unique – I’d wear turquoise cufflinks every second Friday, but never more turquoise than the ones the others wore. And with all this there was the feeling that one day some crazy motherfucker would hack into the know-how systems, erase every precedent, and leave us all lost.

  At 8.30 a.m. on Friday 20 January 2006 a commuter passing over one of London’s bridges looked out of a train window. What he saw made him call the police. He told them he feared he was hallucinating. But he was not hallucinating. By lunchtime Sky News had set up an uninterrupted live feed. Tens of thousands of Londoners flocked to the banks of the Thames.

  The River Thames Whale. I have just looked him up on my ultra-fast broadband, to better remind myself of the details. And it turns out that, despite the resemblance to my father-in-law, the bottlenose that got lost in London that January was in fact a she. Did you know that? Strange, actually, because for two days in January 2006 the news contained nothing but information about the whale, and I followed the rescue attempts closely, yet at no time did I realise it was a female bottlenose I was looking at. Somewhere in the cross-current of perceptions I lost a salient fact. I now know how Tiny Tony O felt all those years ago, when he had that unfortunate mix-up with the Thai bar worker. Back in the days when he had trouble getting women. The days when women liked men to be taller than them.

  Everything would have felt foreign to her: the sandy banks, the five-foot depth, the dinosaur rumble of helicopters, loudspeakers, trains on tracks. All these noises reverberating in the whale’s exquisite ear bones, hard and dense, pitchfork-fine. Onlookers waded in, trying to guide her back into the deep. An environmental-science student going by the unimprovable name of Edwin Timewell whispered messages of support into the shallows.

  I’ve developed a purely ironic attachment to daytime TV. Unlike evening TV, there is no sense of shared vision. If you’re floating in the higher channels before dark it’s probably just you and some chronic old grandma watching, observing the can-opener that is also a cat flap, navigating ingenious products that are always in stock. Sometimes when I go to bed I leave it on low, buzzing through the wall. A TV playing to an empty room: the only thing spookier is no sound at all. And the next morning I’ll pick up the remote, start the process again, catch the chatter of property shows on 124. I barely feel alone. Loneliness is the half-second wait while the screen sputters to life, a tiny dot becoming planet-sized.

  Around every fact there are a thousand theories. Why was she there? Disease, parasite infection, pollution? Any one of these could disorientate a whale. Submarines, ships, military sonar? NATO preparing messages of war, sending Nature’s signalling off track? That or the simple hunt for food, the old primeval fear of not having enough to eat, a wrong turn on the way to the North Atlantic, swimming too far south in the search for squid. I can see why you’d go searching for squid. Thai Chilli Squid was my favourite dish at the Icarus.

  A few days after Christine confirmed she wasn’t coming back, I bumped into Dennis at the hospital. During Joy’s time there our visiting schedules clashed once or twice. We were silent at her bedside, but on the asphalt, two men moving on, we discussed going for a beer. He was busy, and I needed to get back to the flat, so we left it. Probably best to avoid a drink with that misery guts anyway. Joy was beginning to improve, he was back in proper employment, some pretentious publisher had bought his book – he had everything he wanted, in short, and yet he seemed to have become broken in the getting of it. All his fizzy enthusiasm had gone flat, become a sort of sour hysteria. I explained as much to Nurse Covas Callas, a kind and moderately alluring girl who I subsequently invited to share coffee with me. She smiled and said she wasn’t attracted to ‘conventionally handsome’ men. That made me laugh for a long hard time. Interesting how some girls think flaws add colour: a stammer, a scar, terrible teeth. They think it amounts to ‘character’, that elusive magnetic thing. Their world is not ours, Doctor Odd. We are tuned to different channels.

  The beast showed signs of flexion when briefly stranded and the next morning, 21 January, a vet in the marine rescue team expressed concerns that it was not swimming in a determined manner. I loved that choice of words: ‘determined manner’. It’s the kind of thing you’d say in your clever nasal way.

  I have been meaning to get round to Mum and Dad’s, to replace that light bulb. But I get distracted watching DVDs and arranging their boxes on the shelves. I make little lists for myself these days: take out bins, change light bulb, rearrange DVDs. During office days I never thought about my parents much. But now I do. As I wander through London alone I see planes waiting to touch down
at City Airport, flickering in the fog, and I think about my childhood a lot. Would it make a difference to your analysis, out of interest, if I told you I had a tricky time at school? My memories of happy childhood times shame me with their thinness. The lack of nostalgia they gather. One C Team football game here. One split knee there. I can only hope that by the time I’ve finished this letter they will feel different, somehow, my memories. Less flimsily fake. More like holy wishful things that transcend the walls, the walls which are cloud grey, whale grey, dirty tea towel, aged paper.

  By the time Christine and I got to Battersea Bridge the banks were five-deep with bodies. The London Eye downstream stood still. Christine said this was the sort of sight Joy wouldn’t want to miss so we tried, with no success, to phone her. We elbowed our way through the soft jostle of coats and scarves and found ourselves at the water’s edge. The air smelt of damp clothes and fast-food farts. We were cold and miserable. Vets had decided to deliberately beach the bottlenose at low tide, then winch her onto a rescue barge. It sounded exciting, but the operation was taking shape under tarpaulin – slowly, and in silence.

  And then it happened. After what felt like hours, we finally got the glimpse we wanted. A seven-tonne beast hoisted high in the air.

  ‘Wow,’ Christine said.

  ‘Wow,’ I said.

  It was a sight so strange it made us small again, instilled in us that toddler trait of wide-eyed awe, faithfully repeating the already said. Wow. Wow. From our vantage point she looked like a sleek black bomb, an effete missile waiting to be loaded onto a plane destined for Iraq or Afghanistan, somewhere we’d never been but had seen on screen. There was an odd kind of truth to the moment, a whale hanging in the sky. It contained an unleashing from our daily lives.