An Irresponsible Age

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  ‘I was about to wash up, only half of it’s been sort of arranged …’

  ‘You mean on our chairs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Ma’s rule. She tried to get us to help but we just argued, so she said the least we could do was to wash up our own things and when we forgot, she put them on our chairs.’

  ‘And what if you still didn’t clear them?’

  ‘They would still be there in the morning.’

  ‘But why does she still do it now?’

  Juliet looked confused.

  After Jacob had washed up, he found the family slumped in front of a television in a small room at the back of the house. Clara, Juliet, Carlo and Fred were squashed together on a sofa, their arms and legs trailed round and over one another. Mary sat on the floor at their feet and Stefan was asleep in an armchair. When Jacob said goodnight, only Mary replied.

  How odd the Cloughs looked, drained by the television’s light. Their outlines were so harsh. Fred was too delicate, epicene even, and Carlo venal. Clara in profile was a hook-nosed witch and Juliet was, well, plain. Then they all threw back their heads and laughed at something Jacob couldn’t see, and he watched their shadows bobbing on the far wall – infantile, hilarious, monstrous.

  SIX

  One Sunday morning in April, Jacob arrived at Khyber Road.

  ‘Why does he just turn up like this?’ Fred hissed to Juliet in the kitchen. ‘You must have given him the number by now.’

  ‘What for?’ retorted Juliet, who admired Jacob’s lack of manners. ‘Would you tidy up? Bake a cake?’

  ‘No, I’ve got more important things to do and anyway, if I knew he was coming, I’d leave.’ He took an ostentatious breath, ‘He’s not right.’

  ‘How would you know? You’ve hardly spoken to him.’

  ‘He doesn’t look right.’

  Jacob did look wrong: too tall for the low-ceilinged room, too clean for its murky walls, too well-made for the failing sofa. He was wearing an indigo shirt, half unbuttoned and untucked. One sleeve was rolled up over a fine-boned golden forearm.

  Apollo, thought Juliet as she came back in with a bottle of wine and two glasses. Fucking Apollo. He did take up a lot of space.

  ‘How’s Federico?’ Jacob asked, taking Juliet’s hand and leading her up the stairs to her room. He stood by the open window, a concentration of blue and gold against the fading blue and gold sky.

  ‘Still in love with that girl Caroline, who works on the same floor. She rents a room from this dreadful couple and I think she’s sleeping with the man.’

  ‘That sounds,’ Jacob began, pulling Juliet down on top of him as he lay back, ‘like a tedious story.’

  Juliet did not like to talk about Jacob. She wouldn’t have known what to say. He disappeared from the gallery and appeared at Khyber Road, and they would lie like this and he would kiss and stroke her, not where she might expect him to but on her calves, ribs, cheekbones and wrists. It was as if they were starting obliquely, with Jacob approaching her from the steepest possible angle so that she couldn’t see him until he was absolutely there.

  His attention turned her in on herself. She hadn’t noticed how inert she had become when she was with him or that their conversation consisted of Jacob’s questions and her answers. She made the assumptions about his quietness that people usually made, and thought of his interest in her as a pleasing but not particularly useful thing. She did not know what she felt, and anyway she was tired. Two months had passed since Tobias’s death and Juliet was not sleeping well. Her pain had not got worse but she could bear it less, her physical pain that is, for Juliet acknowledged no other. There would be a moment when the small of her back burst into flame, and then the glass and stone in her would rise, and her voice and breath were sucked down into the fire. She took the painkillers as the doctor had instructed, and more when she needed them.

  As Fred plucked each petal from the rose, he stopped himself saying ‘She loves me, she loves me not.’ Whether or not someone loved you was not the point of loving them. He laid the petals out and selected a dozen of the largest and roundest. Parchment, the recipe said. Parchment.

  As Jacob unbuttoned Juliet’s shirt, there was a knock at the door and Fred’s tremulous voice called: ‘Jules?’

  She pulled the shirt together and stood up. ‘Juliet. What is it?’

  Fred asked as casually as he could: ‘Have we got any parchment?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Parchment.’

  ‘Parchment?’

  Jacob reached for his cigarettes.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Cooking.’

  ‘You mean greaseproof paper?’

  ‘No, parchment.’

  ‘Oh, for god’s sake go and talk to him properly!’ One of Jacob’s other voices – vicious and shrill. The fire in Juliet’s belly leapt through her skin and she had a sense of herself drawing back, as if violently recovering her edges. She buttoned her shirt and went downstairs with Fred, where she spent a long time looking through drawers until she found an old manila envelope which she opened and flattened, assuring Fred that it would do perfectly well as parchment.

  When Juliet came back up, Jacob was standing naked by her shelves. He was confident, imperfect, and made nothing of his beauty. He flicked through one book after another. ‘Who is G. Clough?’ he asked, holding up an annotated edition of Hamlet.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘G.?’

  ‘I was christened Giulietta. No one could spell or pronounce it.’

  Jacob had remembered something and was reaching for another book: ‘Oh yes, I found this.’ He brandished the title page of a broken-backed copy of The Catcher in the Rye. ‘Another incarnation?’

  ‘Don’t …’

  In curlicued script, ‘Juliette C.’ The dot over the ‘i’ was a circle.

  ‘Your French period? Left Bank?’

  Juliet grabbed the book. ‘Just think yourself lucky that I didn’t draw smiley faces.’ She pushed him towards the bed. ‘Or hearts.’

  He snatched the book back as she unbuttoned her shirt once more. ‘And somewhere you will have written “irony” in the margin. Oh yes, page sixty-five …’

  In the kitchen, Fred balanced a small saucepan containing a broken-up bar of dark chocolate inside a nest of chopsticks and skewers suspended over a larger pan of boiling water. Every time the teaspoon he was stirring it with got too hot to hold, he chucked it onto the floor and reached for another. Six teaspoons later, the chocolate had melted. He moved the pan onto the table and rushed off to the bathroom to fetch Juliet’s tweezers.

  He held up a petal with the tweezers and dipped it into the chocolate. It disappeared. He tried again and the second petal stayed in his grip but wilted to a stringy blob. It wouldn’t work. He went and got his back-up rose out of the sink and shoved it in, head first, stirring it round in the chocolate as if loading a brush. This he laid on the parchment and put in the fridge without looking too closely.

  Jacob was running a finger up and down Juliet’s spine. ‘Giulietta! Juliette! Juliet!’ he recited, the first in theatrical Italian, the second in pouting French and the third as dully as he could. Then in an imitation of Fred’s plaintiveness, ‘Jules! Jules! What an ugly diminutive.’ He was a poor mimic and sounded like a boy trying to amuse and impress other boys.

  ‘You can be really quite unpleasant,’ she said and meant it, but did not feel it.

  She lay on her front and Jacob pressed himself down onto her back and then was inside her. The shock of pleasure was so strong that she lifted herself up to encourage him to push deeper. Jacob tilted his body to one side and as he pushed again – once, slow – he touched the centre of her pain so exactly that she cried out. She waited for Jacob to move, but he didn’t. He took his weight off her but stayed where he was, a containing pressure. He laid his head next to hers, one hand on her shoulder.

  When the pain passed, Juliet shifted onto one side and began to speak. No one could have lis
tened to her more carefully than Jacob did then, his head against hers. Juliet told him about the glass and stones and fire, and then, when he showed no sign of distaste, the blood and vomit and brown water. With these details he began to stroke her breasts, belly and thighs so lightly that her body, used to retreating at the first sign of pain, had to travel back towards him in order to make sense of his touch.

  ‘You aren’t going anywhere,’ he murmured and then moved her onto her front once more, and ran the tip of his tongue down her spine and on and on, flooding the pain with pleasure, nothing more than the tip of his tongue, even as she parted her legs again and raised herself again and craved him.

  Juliet woke to find Jacob lying dressed beside her. His stare was so forceful that she was unable to meet it and because he stared so much of the time, she hardly saw him. When she tried to describe him to herself, she found she couldn’t. What did she know about him? That he had a wife, a sister and a mother.

  ‘How is your mother?’

  ‘My mother is nothing to do with us.’ He pulled back the sheet and ran his hand over her shoulder, waist and hip. ‘You are ideally angular,’ he said in a voice that thickened with desire and then lightened again. ‘What you have to understand is that no one is anything to do with us.’

  When Fred came downstairs he found Jacob in the kitchen, making a pot of tea.

  ‘Good morning,’ Fred conceded and was annoyed that Jacob didn’t offer him some tea although he would have been just as annoyed if he had. ‘Where’s Juliet?’

  ‘Sleeping, I hope.’

  ‘You hope?’

  ‘Her pain was particularly bad last night.’

  ‘Her pain … oh, her pain. And what do you know about her pain?’

  ‘That she needs to see a doctor.’

  ‘She’s done that. She’s got pills.’

  ‘Then she needs to see a good one.’

  ‘And are you a good doctor?’

  This was important, so Jacob made himself reply.

  Fred expected not to hear what Jacob said, which is perhaps why he didn’t. ‘You’re always whispering like that, as if the world’s one big private joke!’

  Jacob had no idea what to do with other men’s anger. He tried to smile.

  Fred continued: ‘How long have you known about Juliet’s pain?’

  Jacob shrugged.

  ‘Exactly. You barely know her and you certainly don’t understand her condition. She’s always been like this. She sees a doctor and she takes pills. Today she’s bad and tomorrow she’ll be better, especially if you leave her alone.’

  ‘She’s not herself.’

  Fred smiled. ‘We none of us are. How can we be? We lost our brother, remember?’

  What Jacob had been about to say was as cruel as it was true, but there was something about this boy – a need not to know – that stopped him.

  That day, Juliet began to cry. It started as she cycled to work. At first she thought it was because the pain in her back was so tiring, even though she had taken the pills; the pills, too, were tiring. She arrived at the gallery and wiped her eyes, sat at her desk and wept some more. The more she cried, the angrier she felt and by the end of the day, after she had struggled through several phone calls and made a number of mistakes in writing letters and organising files, she decided she had to talk to someone. Not one of her friends, because that would take the thing out into the world and she wasn’t yet ready for that.

  Carlo drove from the hospital to collect Juliet from the gallery, persuading her to leave her bicycle there. As soon as she saw him, Juliet started to cry once more. He took her to an old and charmless trattoria in Holborn, where everything tasted the same and of nothing so much as yellow and red. They drank fizzing wine and warm tap water, and Juliet crumbled breadsticks as she sobbed and tried to explain.

  ‘I can’t concentrate.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I never know what’s about to happen any more.’

  ‘No one does, most of the time.’

  ‘That’s just one of your mortuary lines.’

  ‘I don’t live my life according to the dead.’

  ‘Of course you do, we all do. Look at us now. The only thing we know for certain about the future is that Tobias will go on being dead and we’ll go on rattling about, trying to take up the space he left behind him until the next one of us dies and leaves even more room.’

  ‘Space is filled.’

  ‘That depends on how you define it.’

  ‘So it’s Tobias?’

  ‘No. Is that wrong? I don’t think it is. I know what happened to him. It’s me that’s making me so cross.’

  ‘You’re cross? I thought you were sad.’

  ‘Oh no. I’m furious.’

  ‘Why?’

  It took Juliet some effort to look up and when she did, her eyes blinked, her mouth wobbled and her forehead contorted.

  Carlo had never seen her so unclear. He asked her again, ‘Why are you so cross?’

  ‘Because I feel so much and I don’t know what I feel.’

  ‘It never ceases to surprise me,’ said Barbara as she kicked the car door shut, ‘that you grew up in a bungalow.’ She pressed her key fob and the car gave an obedient yelp.

  Jacob had not spoken since they set off from London. He had refused to answer Barbara’s questions about his plans, about his room and about Juliet. He walked up the mossy path kicking a little at the squat succulent plants along its edge, and waited for Barbara to ring the bell. Through the wired glass they could make out Monica inching her way towards them, propelling her walking frame through the pile of the carpet. She was repeating a long croak: ‘Coming! Coming!’

  Barbara set down two large shopping bags on the step. Jacob took her hand and held it tightly. They waited.

  As Monica inched towards them, Barbara took charge. ‘Couldn’t we just go in the back? Or get a key? I know she’s scared that if she can’t answer her own front door, we’ll put her away but –’

  ‘You talked to my sister?’ It was something Sally had reported to him, too.

  ‘Why do you have to bring Blue Eyes!’ Monica was shouting as she neared the door. ‘Still got you on a lead, has she? You thought you’d given her the slip but oh no, here you are at her heel. I’m surprised she deigns to come down here at all – never used to. Hello Blue Eyes. See? I’m not dead yet.’ Her voice sawed and mewed.

  Barbara knelt down to the letterbox to call, ‘Hullo, darling. Here we are!’

  The Shipping Gallery Spring Show was to feature four young artists known as Collective Urge. They lived and worked in two flats at the top of one of the tower blocks near Juliet’s house in Khyber Road. A week before the show opened, the council had declared the block unsafe due to leaking asbestos, and the collective were refusing to move, claiming that it was a ploy to empty the building so that it could be sold off for development. Tania was delighted.

  Juliet came through with a phone message. ‘Someone from the collective just rang.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. They don’t seem to use names.’

  ‘Of course. Well?’

  ‘They want to add something to The Lounge.’ This was a replica of the collective’s living room, in which one of the group was going to sit watching a television screen showing another of the artists back at the tower block who would be simultaneously watching the one in the gallery.

  ‘Of course. What do they want to add?’

  ‘Asbestos.’ Juliet watched Tania’s face as she computed the implications of this. Juliet had come to admire her employer’s shrewdness and the ways in which she conserved herself.

  ‘This is one for the Arts Council and I’m having lunch with the new Chief Executive today. Oh –’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It’s just that it’s Barbara, you see, Barbara Dart.’

  Juliet blushed. ‘I don’t want to put you in a difficult position,’ she began. It seemed the proper thing to say, but Tania loo
ked amused.

  Juliet felt nervous. ‘I don’t know what she knows, if she knows, not that it’s a secret or anything, I mean after all they are separated … for months now … and it’s not as if he left her for –’

  Tania patted her arm. ‘How would I know?’

  At that moment, Barbara marched into the gallery swinging a large shopping bag Juliet recognised as being from a shop she read about in magazines. Barbara swooped on Tania, kissed her and held open the bag. ‘Look what I found for Monica!’ She pulled out a tartan blanket in antique shades of blue and brown.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Tania. ‘Who’s Monica?’

  Juliet was unable to move. Barbara didn’t acknowledge her but spoke as if on stage in front of her. ‘Jakes’s mother. She had a stroke but is soldiering on. Her memory’s shot. She can only really cope with people she knows so we’re trying to keep her at home. We go every Sunday.’ A glance at Juliet.

  ‘I see.’ Tania reached out an arm to Juliet and, without intending to, pushed her away. ‘My assistant, Juliet Clough.’

  ‘Yes.’ Barbara busied herself putting the blanket back in the bag. ‘Never mind.’

  Juliet could hear Jacob in his room. There was a note poking out of the hole in the wall but she did not retrieve it. She found three reasons not to come back to the gallery that afternoon. She would collect catalogue proofs, return slides and call in on the security firm who were to install the close-circuit television cameras for The Lounge. Perhaps she would pick up some asbestos and deliver it to the Arts Council. Perhaps she would walk in and slam it down on the desk and say ‘Fund that, bitch.’ Then again, the Art Council subsidised her job. Bitch.

  SEVEN

  Mary still sang the one song, but each week differently. The band were always surprised and liked the challenge of following her lead. Some people came back again and again, and knowledgeably compared details of one version with another. She became more confident and sang less, and in these pauses stared into the crowd and felt herself rushing towards and through it. The rest of the time Tobias, his absence, was in front of everything. Stop.