Limestone and Clay

by Lesley Glaister

  ‘Simon. I saw Celia,’ she begins, watching his face for the slightest sign. He gives none. ‘Celia told me …’ she says experimentally, and from the little electric twitch of his muscles, the flinching of his eyes, she knows that it is all true. He does not ask, What?, and she does not tell him. The minute hope she had that it was a lie or Celia’s fantasy falls away. He does not reply. His fingers splay uselessly open.

  Nadia grasps his fingers and twists them in her own. ‘What can I do?’ she says and her voice is thick with despair. ‘Simon. How am I supposed to bear it?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbles, and the insulting inadequacy of this word makes her snort. But what other words are there? Oh yes. ‘I love you,’ he adds.

  Nadia drops his hand. It lies crumpled on the white sheet like a dead flower. She stands up, walks around, pours herself a glass of tepid water from his jug.

  Simon gives a weak cough and groans with the pain of it. A nurse sweeps the curtain aside. ‘All right?’ she says. ‘Shall I help you turn?’ She lumps Simon, groaning, onto his side. She smells of cigarettes. She puts a hand on Simon’s forehead and frowns. Nadia notices a tattoo on her wrist, half hidden by her cuff. Despite her despair she finds herself grinning at this incongruity. ‘I’ll get Doctor to pop in …’ the nurse says. She frowns again, feeling his pulse and squinting at her watch. ‘Five minutes,’ she says to Nadia.

  Nadia nods and the nurse leaves, whisking the curtain shut again.

  ‘Oh Christ, Nadia, I hurt,’ Simon groans. ‘It hurts in my chest.’

  ‘Bruising,’ Nadia snaps. She will not feel sorry for him. Easy for him to evade the problem now, to retreat into pain. Oh, there is real pain. He is not putting it on, it isn’t that she thinks that. His cheeks have suddenly paled. The tenderness rises again, flickering through her anger like weak sun through gathering clouds. She strokes his forehead. It is hot. ‘Simon,’ she sighs. ‘You know I love you too. But how can I stand this?’ She puts her knuckle in her mouth and bites, the hard pain preventing her tears. It is not fair to do this to Simon now. He is in real pain, real physical pain. Which after all may be easier to bear.

  ‘I’d better go,’ she says. ‘I’ll be back.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ Simon says. He grips her hand, but his is slippery with sweat, easy to pull away from. ‘Oh my head aches,’ he mutters. ‘Nadia, why am I hurting more and more?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll tell the nurse you’ve got a headache on my way out.’ Nadia kisses him on his mouth and feels a shock of angry desire. She picks up her bag. ‘Bye-bye. Try and sleep.’ Her own head is swimming. She has lost track of time. She has not eaten or slept. Her head throbs still and her nipples sting. She frowns, remembering Sophie’s voracious sucking. It is like a dream now, that, the greedy lips, the garish roses, the sticky drink, the game, the horrible sour milky mess and the terrible fright when at last she got home, of finding the flat empty, of finding Simon’s note. Miles had answered the phone and organised everything. She cannot remember much more than the blackness thinning over the edges of the hills, the pale lemon of the dawn discovering the dewy huddles of sheep, the gnawing of anxiety. People had spoken to her one after another, urged her to do this or that, eat this, drink that, go home. But she had stood frozen while the dawn turned to day, while under the earth people risked their own lives to prise out her lover.

  ‘Wait,’ Simon says. His eyes are closed now.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It should be yours,’ he whispers. His voice has lost its colour, it is a paper voice.

  Nadia cannot answer. She presses her lips together hard until she can feel the edges of her teeth against them. She squeezes his hand, and then she leaves.

  Simon opens his eyes. There is the flowered material. What are the flowers supposed to be? They are very bright. Orange and brown. Are there brown flowers? The word ‘nasturtiums’ comes from somewhere. Nadia has gone. When did she go? He can feel her finger stroking his palm, potter’s fingers stroking as if he is clay, as if she is smoothing him out. He frowns and feels the rising furrows like the ridges on the wall of a cave, flow lines. Or like, more like, the lines on a clay mask, just made, soft glistening furrows. Wet corduroy. His father had lines that arched like a rainbow on his brow when he was surprised. There is a sound above the rustling clanging hospital sounds, a constant sound, high-pitched. Is it the light? His mother had soft arms. If you pinched the skin above her elbows it held the mark like dough. Made her laugh crossly, slap him away. Yes, it is the light that is high-pitched. What? Buzz. This is discovery. He should tell someone. He is in the world and he can hear the light. Humming. And Nadia’s thighs are like silk. Her buttocks are coarse-skinned but the insides of her thighs … Sound and light are one. They are part of the same continuum. Is this not known? Has he not demonstrated it on the blackboard? It is so plainly true. Sound is low, from a mumble to a hum, light high, from a song to a whine to a scream which becomes … phosphorescence, moon shimmer, the scream of the sun which is pain too. What was it his mother said? The sun is heat and it is light and it is pain. There is the smell of heat and the taste of sun-baked stone. Surely he has tasted sun-baked stone? Or is it just the orange curtain. Marigolds? Chrysanthemums? He never paid attention. And his mother would always say … something … something about light, was it? He wants to shout. Why is it so bloody cold and why is he shuddering? What was it in the cave that he cannot remember? Something seen. Surely there is limestone in his eyes. ‘Nadia,’ he says, and his voice is a real thing, a clear thing that rises from him, separate like a balloon. It will float out and somebody will see it, nudging between the curtains. Nadia.

  He is filling with pain like a vessel, like a bladder swelling. His ribs are stretched now. No longer squeezed, they blossom out like fans, like wings. He is a balloon tight with pain and it is beyond white … what is it called, the colour beyond white? There was something he saw that he should remember, that he should tell. Nadia is not there. His eyes are closed, he thinks, but what is the dazzle? And his mother said switch off the light. Is that it?

  Simon has a hazy notion that people are working on him, hauling in the thread of his life on the end of which he floats, loosely. After the bursting in his chest he floated into a place where the taste and the light were like sweet butter and where he slithered warmly, quite contentedly, but they are pulling him back, reeling him in as surely as if he was a fish.

  When she gets home, Nadia lies on the floor, her hands loosely open, her knees rolled apart. She draws in smooth breath, focusing her mind on the way it flows. From Iris’s flat downstairs comes the sound of the television. There is a comedy on, the laughter comes in stupid blurts. Nadia closes her mind to it. Tries to imagine the colour gold, to concentrate on drawing golden breaths inside to suffuse her muscles and her heart with well-being, but the colour of her breath remains resolutely grey. She pushes up her back to make a bridge, cupping her hands under her back, walking her feet out, pressing her shoulders and her soles flat on the floor. Then with a grunt of effort she moves her hands behind her head and pushes up into the Wheel. Her body arches. Outside a car door slams, someone is whistling. We should get double glazing to shut out the noises, she thinks. She’ll suggest it to Simon, she pretends. For it all depends. Simon and Nadia, their future. It all depends. On what, she isn’t sure. She lets herself down onto the floor and tries to relax. But she cannot. There is too much in her mind. See the mind as a river rushing past, she tells herself in the soothing voice of her yoga teacher. You are on the bank watching it all rush past, all the flotsam of your life, all tumbled together in the rushing flow. But it is no good; she cannot remove herself from its splashes, she cannot pull herself out of it, is instead swept into the flow.

  There was a time when Simon caught lice from school and they both had to treat themselves. The lotion was dark and oily and they had to rub it into their hair and leave it on overnight. They had treated each other. Nadia remembers rubbing Simon’s head, the lotion darkening his hair,
rubbing with tiny deft circular motions every inch of his skull, discovering bumps and dips in the bone. That night they had lain together stiffly, their sticky heads on towels to protect the pillows. They had talked about work and about money and lay with a space between them as if the delousing treatment demanded this formality. Later, Nadia had dreamt about Simon, an oily, foul-tasting dream, dreamt he was making love to her on a garage floor and woken to find him really inside her. She had given no sign that she was awake. The taste of the lotion was in her mouth. He fucked her silently, hotly, tightly, and then rolled off, rolled right away from her. She had lain awake for ages afterwards listening to his breathing slowing, feeling sore and wet, cross and confused. They had never spoken of it. She didn’t even know if he had been awake. It had been nothing to do with her, she was sure of that. She could have been anyone or anything. There had been something disgusting about it, the anonymity, the reek of the poison lotion. And yet she had not resisted or even blamed him. She gets up quickly. Why remember that now? She has a filthy taste in her mouth.

  In the kitchen it is as if time has stood still. And indeed it is only a day since Simon sat at the table, eating his meal. His greasy plate is half submerged in the bowl of cold scummy water. Tomato pips and a sliver of egg white float on the surface. Nadia’s own cup is there too. And the tap still drips sluggishly, shivering the greasy surface. She tips out the cold water and with hot water and detergent cleans away every trace of grease.

  Simon’s note is still on the table. She picks it up, crumples it, and then smooths it out. The ink runs with the wetness of her hands. His name is smeared, and his love. The telephone rings.

  ‘Out of danger,’ the woman is saying, ‘no need to come … sleeping soundly.’

  ‘But I didn’t know he was in danger …’ objects Nadia. ‘I thought he was safe … in hospital.’

  ‘We did try to ring … massive infection … cardiac arrest. Unexpected, but can happen … all over now though, sleeping soundly.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Try and get a good night’s sleep yourself, dear, I should. Visiting from ten tomorrow.’

  Nadia puts down the phone and catches sight of herself reflected in the dark window. She looks like one of her own masks, her eyebrows raised crazily, her mouth open. Simon’s had a cardiac arrest? Simon. A heart attack. But he’s all right. Sleeping soundly.

  She wanders about the flat vaguely. What is it she should do? It is night but she is not tired. She should be tired. It is thirty-eight hours since she last slept. At least Simon is sleeping soundly. It is Saturday night. What can she do? There was a song they sang at school, a stupid repetitive song, the point of which was that each verse was in another language. ‘Tout le monde aime samedi nuit.’ She finds herself humming it as she wanders around. In her studio she lifts the cloth from her sculpture, strange, damp, strong thing. She could work. She notices the pile of clay she left yesterday, scrunched by her angry fist on the board. No, she cannot work.

  Iris and Derek have turned the television up downstairs. It sounds like a film now, she can hear shots being fired, the roar of a speeding car. She could go down and see them. Iris would listen to her, welcome her. She remembers Iris trying to attract her attention last night. Was her hair really black and piled up like a bonfire? She closes the door of her studio, thinking of Iris’s room downstairs with the filthy crow feathers everywhere. She was right about Simon anyway, about the danger. Probably just coincidence. Easier to think that. If not, how to make sense of it?

  A heart attack. Simon. She cannot connect the two ideas in her mind. Heart attacks aren’t for fit young men. She remembers the sensation of Simon’s heart beating against her own, or against her ear when she lay with her head on his chest. The comforting regularity. And it stumbled, stopped. Arrested. No. But it’s all right. It is all right.

  Iris told her to contact her mother. A mother alone, she said she saw. Well that is wrong, for her mother is living with Michael in Eastbourne. And Iris talked about a lump. Nadia has the phone number in her diary. She picks the receiver up and puts it down several times. It is rather late – nearly eleven – to be ringing, out of the blue like this. But she needs someone. Just someone to talk to.

  She finds she has dialled the number before she is really ready. She listens, discomforted, to the sound of it ringing in that unknown house. Luxurious, June said on her Christmas card. That’s all the contact they’ve had for years, Christmas cards, birthday greetings, cowardly scrawls on cards full of ready-made words. What if Michael answers? He’s angry with her for neglecting their mother. There is a spider’s web on the paper lampshade. She remembers a dark-painted room with stars and moons and the lorries roaring by, rattling the windows. How dreadful and dark and sordid it must have seemed to June, and yet she never said. The soul of tact, that is the sort of thing she would have inwardly said. The phone is still ringing. No one there. Nadia is relieved. She stands on tiptoes and bats the lampshade. Dust showers onto her head and scatters on the striped rug. And then a woman answers. It is Donna, Michael’s wife.

  ‘Could I speak to June please,’ Nadia says. She winces, waiting to be asked for her name, but Donna doesn’t ask.

  ‘Hang on,’ is all she says and bangs the receiver down unnecessarily hard. No wonder she is cross, disturbed by a stranger at this time on a Saturday night – at the climax of a film perhaps. She can hear the muted sounds of television. Maybe they are watching the same film as Iris and Derek. Maybe I should watch it, she thinks, if everyone else is. Not a stranger though, part of the family. A selfish cow, Michael once said Donna considered her.

  ‘Mum,’ Nadia can hear her calling. She is a long time coming to the telephone. Nadia is cold. She thinks of Simon sleeping soundly, his heart restored. What if he had died? Dreadfully, dreadfully, she finds herself thinking that at least it would be simple then. She would simply be without him. Does she mean it? It’s the sort of thing it’s easy to think when everything’s all right. She hears a rustle and then her mother’s voice, ‘Hello. June Samson speaking. Who is this please?’

  Nadia’s mouth is dry. She swallows. June Samson, of course, her new married – widowed – name. ‘Mum?’

  ‘Pardon. You’ll have to speak up …’ The voice is firm, it sounds no older than before, and is there an Australian twang? Surely not.

  ‘It’s Nadia,’ Nadia says.

  There is silence, a seashell sound in the cupped plastic, two hundred miles of surprise transmitted down a wire.

  ‘Nadia,’ June says at last. ‘Well …’

  ‘Mum, I …’ What on earth can she say? Suddenly she is tired. Too tired to think.

  ‘Well, this is a surprise. I was thinking about cocoa.’

  ‘It’s late. Sorry.’

  ‘Not at all. Well, this is nice. After all this time.’

  ‘Yes … I …’ Even Nadia’s mouth is tired. She is puzzled, starts as if from a dream of telephoning her mother to find herself telephoning her mother.

  ‘Are you well?’

  ‘Oh … fine. You?’

  ‘Well you know.’

  ‘I’m sorry about … Pierre. Sorry I didn’t write or anything.’

  ‘Didn’t expect it, dear.’ There is the faintest frosty edge to the voice.

  ‘I know, Mum. I am sorry … for everything.’ This wasn’t why I rang, Nadia thinks. It was for me, to talk about me. And Simon is sleeping peacefully; not peacefully, that is for dead people, sleeping soundly.

  ‘And your young man, Simon is it? Is he all right?’

  ‘Fine.’ Nadia shakes her head disbelievingly to hear herself say this, watches the walls slide past her sleepy eyes. ‘How’s Michael? And the family?’ she asks, obedient to convention. It is getting out of her control, all these platitudes, ready-written lines. She panics, waves her hand, finds her voice rising, interrupts her mother’s response. ‘I wanted to say sorry.’

  ‘Well I should think so, after fifteen years …’

  ‘No, I mean … I
was remembering that time, the last time we really spoke.’

  ‘Daddy’s funeral?’

  ‘No Mum, before that … don’t you remember? You came to see me. You needed to talk.’

  ‘Did I dear? About Daddy?’

  ‘No. You must remember. The room with the moons and the stars. You came for tea, we had shrimps and Battenburg … you needed to talk, you said you had no one else, no other friends.’

  There is a rustling at the other end as if June is leafing through the pages of her memory. ‘Well I had your father, before he died of course, and Pierre …’

  ‘No women. No one to confide in …’

  ‘Don’t be silly, dear. I had you, and Auntie Betty.’

  ‘But you didn’t, that’s the point. Don’t you see? You didn’t have me, I failed you. I let you down.’

  There is quiet for a moment. ‘I’m sorry dear, you’ve lost me. Of course I’ve been upset that we’ve … well, gone our separate ways, but now you’ve rung …’ Nadia holds the telephone away from her as her mother talks, looking at the inscrutable grey plastic, slick with the sweat from her palm, the miniature familiar voice issuing from the daisy pattern of holes. Plans spin out of her mother like the filaments of a web to draw Nadia back. Visits, parties, holidays together. She must meet Simon. Nadia must meet Michael’s children. It will all be so normal, and so much fun.

  ‘Yes,’ Nadia says. The stripes on the rug writhe like snakes. She blinks her eyes firmly to stop them and finds that they want to stay shut. There are bright fuzzy shapes inside her eyelids like amoebas.

  ‘Mustn’t forget your phone bill,’ her mother is saying.

  ‘No,’ Nadia agrees, and her voice is sluggish in her mouth. It does not want to come out.

  ‘But you will visit soon? I’ll speak to Donna and ring you tomorrow.’

  ‘Good,’ Nadia says. ‘I’ll have to go, Mum. Nice to speak to you.’