A Man Melting

by Craig Cliff

  Without answers, I am destined to oscillate between anger and affection. There is no ending here — how could there be with another copy on the way? — but I still want to treat all these unresolved mysteries, these burrs, as clues I can organise and make sense of as a whole. I want to say my father’s life was a series of imperfect repetitions, and the tattoo and his death are just different copies of the same thing. Different pearls on the necklace. I want to prove that Life — the course of existence of an entire species — is also a series of imperfect repetitions. I want to be stopped on the street and mistaken for my father. I want to be the natural continuation of his unnaturally shortened life. I want a tattoo in the same place he had. I want to place my child on my back and let it read the same message I read. I want to wear my father’s second wedding ring — the copy — and let it taper under my finger. Leave the trail of gold he should have left, but leave it for my child.

  Because when I echo my father, I feel closest to him.

  Embracing these echoes is the only way I can express my love for him, and the only hope I have of knowing him again.

  Oh! So Careless

  Penny marched back into the GameStation on Princes Street. It had been so long since someone had made a joke about her name when handing back change that it wasn’t until she stepped outside that it fully registered. ‘A penny for a Penny,’ the shop assistant had said. He’d helped her find a copy of the game Leo had been dropping hints about; he knew her name because he’d asked in that ambiguous way, halfway between flirting and good service. His name was Shaun; she’d read his name badge.

  Back in the store, there was a queue at the counter. Shaun was ringing up another customer’s purchase. She stood at the end of the line for a moment, long enough to look around, see the empty display boxes: a fitting metaphor for all the wasted hours spent playing these games. With this thought, she stepped out of line and up to the corner of the counter, then had to stand there, jiggling on the spot, trying to catch Shaun’s eye.

  ‘Thanking you,’ he said to the middle-aged man who had just purchased a stack of games.

  ‘I don’t appreciate being made fun of,’ Penny said.

  ‘Sorry, I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘Shaun, Shaun, Shaun, Shaun, Shaun,’ she said. He looked down at his own name badge, then back at Penny’s reddening face. ‘The sheep has been Shaun, Shaun of the Dead, Shauning has broken, Shaun to be wild …’

  The other shop assistant and the line of customers were looking at her. Shaun dipped his head again towards his name badge.

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘That was wrong of me. I fear we’ve both been blinded now.’

  ‘What?’ asked the other shop assistant.

  ‘An eye for an eye. Forget it. Forget it forget it.’

  It had become a mantra of hers. Forget it forget it. The way she said it sounded like a car driving too fast over a judder bar, with bumps for the front and the back wheels. Forget it forget it. But there was no magic in this mantra. No ancient breathing technique hidden in the words.

  She was back in Edinburgh as autumn was cracking its knuckles and people couldn’t help talking about the weather with phrases like another dreich one and dead of the year, phrases you’d never hear on Zanzibar where, in the middle of winter, she and Leo had sat on the beach sipping pina coladas from coconut halves.

  ‘This is the life, eh?’ he had said, but she was thinking about the sand.

  ‘It’s only Kande Beach that has those worms, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think so.’

  I think so. What Africa had in sunshine, it lacked in certainty.

  It had been Penny’s idea to go to Africa — to celebrate once she had finished her thesis — but Leo was the one who latched on to it with vigour. Africa became his project. Maybe it was because he hadn’t had a proper holiday since he graduated two years earlier. Or maybe it was something to do with his name: the way the McDonalds of the world must feel when they come to Scotland and leave with bags full of tartan, crest-emblazoned tankards and clan history booklets, secure in the knowledge that their heritage precedes the Golden Arches. Lions had always been Leo’s favourite animal, and now he would see them in the wild.

  He began by reading Lonely Planets and travel blogs while Penny worked on her thesis. From time to time he would announce interesting tidbits from the bed. At first she enjoyed the interruptions, but as he delved deeper into the stories, deeper into the continent, his outbursts became almost indecipherable.

  ‘Did you know all but five of the four hundred species of cichlid are endemic to Lake Malawi?’

  She learnt that ‘Wow’ was always the best response.

  After gaining a double major in business studies and linguistics as an undergrad in New Zealand, Penny had joined the Diaspora of Privilege, as her sister called it (though the capitals were Penny’s addition), and washed up at Edinburgh University. Thanks to the unfaltering encouragement of a certain faculty member over the past five years, she was completing her PhD in Corporation Taxonomy as Leo planned for Africa. Her thesis explored the naming conventions of listed companies in the nineties and noughties, and had found significant (and mildly persuasive) evidence that the names of companies not only affected external investors’ decisions but also affected merger and acquisition activity. Apparently, whether or not the merger of two companies made a pleasing acronym was now an important decision in the real world. That’s what people called business: the Real World. As opposed to academia, which was, by implication, somehow unreal. Of course, Penny had participated in the workforce — waiting tables and answering phones for years until the grant money came (and Leo quietly made up the difference) — but she found it hard to believe the world the decision-makers of these corporations inhabited was the real one. The encouraging faculty member often told Penny she would be snapped up by these very corporations after she published, but she had stopped believing him. And not because he had made advances of a sexual nature, but because the real world seemed so far away. Getting a job from her thesis felt as likely as getting a phone call from a character in a novel she was reading.

  If Leo was any indication, maybe the real world was what she needed. Since starting work for the Royal Bank of Scotland he had blossomed, though she knew not to use this word with him. He was more confident. He dressed better and kept his hair short. His face had slimmed, perhaps because he ate better and drank less as a professional than a student, or perhaps this toning was imprinted in his genes from the beginning. When Penny looked at herself with such scrutiny, she felt embarrassed. She hadn’t let herself go exactly, but she hadn’t matured like Leo. She was still the same sketchy girl she was in high school, perpetually sweeping the blonde hair from her eyes. God, she would think from time to time, I really should dye my hair another colour — though she never did.

  But, when faced with a faculty member with a wife and kids, the keys to a hotel room and promises of champagne and strawberries, Penny realised two things. One: she was not unattractive. Two: it was love she had with Leo, or at least an inexpressible emotion that could stand in for ‘love’ for eternity and no one would ever be hurt or made unhappy if they found out the tiny difference.

  Whatever the case, she began to use the word ‘love’ more often. I love your chin. I love the way you make fried rice. I love watching Top Gear with you.

  Penny ‘loved’ Leo, and he said ‘I love you’ back.

  Once Leo had established what they absolutely must see in Africa, he rang around the travel shops to find an agent who had been on a similar trip.

  ‘This girl at Flight Centre, Jane, has just come back from a forty-five day overland tour. Cape Town to Nairobi.’

  ‘That long?’

  ‘Everyone says it flies by.’

  ‘But you’re in tents the whole time?’

  ‘Pretty much. On Zanzibar you stay in chalets.’

  ‘Zanzibar,’ she said. ‘That’s an island, right?’

  After Leo’s second meetin
g with Jane the travel agent, Penny tried to suggest a shorter tour. ‘Surely twenty-nine nights is long enough?’

  ‘And miss Namibia and the Okavango?’

  ‘Do you really want to be around twenty-two other strangers for one and a half menstrual cycles? They don’t even sell sanitary pads in some of these countries.’

  ‘Yes, they do.’

  ‘No, I read it. Yes, I too have done some reading. They say that if you want to take gifts for the locals, take pens, pencils and sanitary pads because they are hard to come by.’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’

  ‘Oxfam, or something.’

  ‘And what do they suggest we take the lions? Dental floss?’

  Leo took her along for his third meeting with Jane. She had the tanned and freckled complexion of a frequent traveller. Even on the undersides of her forearms. Penny looked at her own milky forearms, but consoled herself that, though she and Jane were about the same age now, in twenty years Jane would look much, much older.

  ‘Leo tells me you’re unsure about the Ultimate Africa tour?’

  ‘I just think a month is long enough.’

  ‘It probably seems that way now, but you won’t think so on your thirtieth day. If given the option of going to the airport or sandboarding in the Namib, everyone would choose to stay.’

  ‘Yes, but if we love it so much, we can go back, right?’

  ‘I guess,’ Jane said, ‘but Africa changes so quickly. Five years ago, everyone was going to Zimbabwe …’

  Leo looked at Penny. Clearly this point would have had more impact if she knew what Zimbabwe had in store for tourists besides first-hand experience of Mugabe’s impersonation of Colonel Kurtz.

  Jane told them both to sleep on it and come to a compromise in the morning; the next day they booked the final two seats on a thirty-day tour from Johannesburg to Nairobi in three months’ time.

  The day Penny handed in her thesis — three weeks before they left for Africa — she cried a little on the bus home, even though she wasn’t that kind of person. When she was fifteen her grandfather had died two weeks after her grandmother and she made it through this second funeral without shedding a tear. It felt like a small victory over grief at the time — though the disproportionate appearance of her grandfather in her dreams since then suggested otherwise. But as she sat upstairs on the bus back to Marchmont, she cried into her palms, as if she was playing the world’s saddest game of hide-and-seek.

  When she got home she checked her emails but there was only a cardholders’ newsletter from Waterstone’s. Nothing from her mother, her big sister in Dublin, or her best friend, who now lived in Kuala Lumpur. This was her big day, the passing of the dreaded deadline, the day she would finally be free to watch TV without guilt and, after Africa, get a job. She logged out but found herself staring at the flashing cursor in the username box and thinking horrible thoughts about the women in her life. She typed Leo’s username, having never done so before and not knowing quite why. Perhaps it was the hunger for conversation. Perhaps it was to see another stagnant inbox and feel better about her own. She didn’t know his password — she had never needed to — but guessed it on her first attempt.

  Later, as they argued, he’d stopped suddenly and asked, ‘How?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How did you get into my emails?’

  ‘It doesn’t take a genius, Leo Jones. Or should I say Senojoel?’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Oh, what? Oh, so careless? Or: Oh, what a fool I’ve been?’

  He started to rub his eyes. They looked moist. She wasn’t sure if he was making himself cry or trying to stop the tears.

  Like all serious fights, this one had rounds, though without the benefit of a bell, Penny never realised it was time to regather until it was too late and they were off again.

  ‘I’m sorry, Pen,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I was doing.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. Right.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘Do you ever?’

  ‘I had a moment of doubt.’

  ‘You’ve been emailing her for two months. I’ve read everything.’

  ‘I was confused.’

  ‘You emailed her today! Stop using the past tense.’

  ‘I was confused. I’m not anymore.’

  ‘That’s convenient, isn’t it?’

  ‘I want to go to Africa with you. With you! I see that now.’

  ‘That’s not what you told Jane. You told me her head was too small.’

  ‘It is!’

  ‘And yet you want her more than me? Thanks, Leo.’

  ‘Penny, god. I’m sorry.’

  In the end, she had to settle for a points decision rather than a knockout. He slept on the couch, she in their double bed. Around two a.m., she awoke to find him standing above her. In the light from the hallway his face looked more chiselled than ever.

  ‘Penny,’ he said.

  ‘Just —’ she said. ‘Just give me tonight.’

  He stroked her hair. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay.’

  When she was alone, things seemed clear enough. Leo had been emailing Jane the travel agent for two months, talking about things only a boyfriend and girlfriend should talk about. Even before the emails got raunchy, when they were just friendly, it was more of a relationship than Penny and Leo had been having for months. She knew it wasn’t all Leo’s fault. That it was her thesis, and her, and possibly something she had never believed in, like the proximity of Venus or her misdeeds in a past life. Leo’s project had simply shifted from Africa to Jane. But the emails … they did get raunchy, then wistful. They both started talking about Penny like an inconvenience. Like an unruly integer in an algebra problem.

  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, when Leo was with her, she couldn’t find the anger, just the sadness. A sadness they both seemed to share. They were both suffering, which made it all the more confusing.

  A week passed and they were still sleeping apart but still living together. She hadn’t told anyone, and neither had he. Even Jane didn’t know that Penny knew. It took that first week of silence from Leo for Jane to twig. Her emails became brusque, full of hidden threats.

  Are you messing me around? I don’t like being messed around.

  ‘Can I just email her once?’ Leo asked. ‘Explain that I was stupid and that I’m sorry for leading her on and that I want you and I’ve always wanted you …’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘No, you don’t. I don’t understand. I don’t know why it makes me feel better to see her suffer, to read as she gets angry. This is all fucked up, Leo.’

  ‘I know, babe, I know.’ He put his hand to her cheek and she leant in and they ended up sleeping together and staying wrapped in each other all night and it was beautiful and sad and probably sick, she wasn’t sure.

  In the morning, still entwined, he said, ‘Come to Africa with me. That was always the plan. Just give me Africa, then decide.’

  The night before their departure they made love again. This time Penny initiated it. As Leo thrust, slow and hard strokes, she shut her eyes tight and thought, forget it forget it.

  They hardly spoke on the plane to Dubai and then to Johannesburg. It was okay. She was okay. But she couldn’t find anything to talk to him about. He’d lost his excitement for the trip. It was suddenly too important.

  He was physically sick the first two days in South Africa, claiming it was jet lag. When he asked to sit up the front of the truck on the first day, Zane, the driver, said, ‘You only lost an hour coming from the UK, how can you be jet lagged?’

  ‘Yeah, but dehydration,’ he said weakly.

  And so Penny spent the seven-hour drive north through the Drakensberg Range with an empty seat next to her. The others played cards, exchanged flight stories and made iPod playlists which would last three songs on the stereo before being pulled in favour of a fresher mix.

  Luckily, or discomfitingly, or predictabl
y, Leo stopped feeling sick when he saw his first lion.

  Back in Edinburgh, Penny found herself chanting forget it forget it as she stood at the photocopier. Her recruitment firm had offered her a two-week assignment doing admin tasks at their own offices while they looked for something more suited to her expertise. Penny could tell that none of the recruiters knew what to do with a PhD candidate. An expert in corporation naming conventions. They found it easier to place travellers and empty-nesters easing themselves back into the workforce. Penny herself didn’t know what sort of job she was qualified for — she was not going to ask a certain faculty member for help, she just wasn’t — and so she found herself opening and sorting the post, copying, laminating, and remembering that other place. Remembering Africa. And no matter how much she chanted, she could not prevent those memories from reappearing. At twenty-six, Leo and Penny were the old married couple of their tour group, despite being neither old nor married. Only Martin, a retired police officer from Melbourne travelling alone, was older. Most were still at university and had just finished exams. Three boys from Reading, fresh out of high school, quickly formed a tight clique with two girls from Bristol who worked at M&S. Then there were four more Australians, a couple of Canadians, two Dutch girls and some more English. Even in Africa, she thought, I am part of the Diaspora of Privilege.

  ‘My parents would never have let me come to Africa when I was eighteen,’ she told Leo on their second night.

  ‘I can’t believe I saw a lion today,’ he said. They had spent the day on a game drive in the Kruger National Park and in addition to lions they had seen a cheetah scared off its prey by a hyena, a hippo bare its teeth and a family of elephants drinking at a waterhole at dusk — but the young ones kept going on about how they still needed to see leopards and rhinos.