by Diana Evans
This, however, was not Melissa’s favourite shape. The length of him was such that he reached right to the end of her and, unable to go any further, shoved and bulged against her, causing an unpleasant ache. ‘Ow,’ she said. ‘Does it hurt? Lift up.’ ‘No, it’s OK,’ she said, not wanting to prolong it. He put a pillow underneath them to help, then further taken with his desire for more, more adventure, more transcendence, more love, he coaxed her up on to all fours, which did not suit their difference in height, she was forced to assume a downward dog shape. There were several of these shiftings to make them match better (we used to match, we used to match so well, thought Michael, what happened?), and at the pinnacle of this disaster, he straightened to full height, straightening her with him. Her hands were flat against the wallpaper, his legs awkwardly bent. He pumped at her, over and over, he couldn’t quite reach the place, kept on angling himself in different ways, going harder and harder, until he finally arrived at his own lonely summit, then crashed forth, defeated and upset, his knees buckling. When it was finished he deflated like the hot-air balloon that had lost its flame, pulling her down with him, and they collapsed in a heap on the mattress.
They were sweating, embarrassed, crestfallen. It was not what they had planned, not redemptive, not romantic. In the leak of the late raffia moon Jill’s words echoed through the air like a ghost, I stand before you … a divorced woman. They lay there, in the cooling red darkness, in the failure of their feast, unable to look each other in the eye. For they both knew, with a sharp, cold definition, that an end point had been reached.
8
CHRISTMAS
Well, thought Michael, if she doesn’t find me attractive, someone else will.
Mayfair, a week before Christmas, the city dressed up for Jesus, windows aglitter, balconies flashing. Michael was on his way to a fancy black-tie, end-of-year trustees’ event at a fancy restaurant in this the fanciest part of town, wearing a new suit, shoes polished, coat open to the cold (he never buttoned his coat), and generally experiencing the world differently. It is remarkable how the defining edges of passing women become sharper when love is slipping from your grip. Everywhere he went now he was aware, like extra-vision, like surround-sound, of all their shapes, contours, sizes and colours, the olives and browns, the talls and shorts, all the warm and luscious women in the world. He was backtracking up along the John Legend tracklist. He was regressing to a post-teenage, pre-Melissa state. Just now, for example, on the bus, standing next to him, the soft, voluptuous, gothic brunette with the slightly cruel lips and heavy mauve eyeshadow. He had not been able to help but notice her trembling porcelain cleavage, the jewels in the soft line. And he could not help but think about how she reminded him of Rachel, of what Rachel would look like if she wore more make-up, though he was glad that she didn’t. Rachel, he hoped, would be there tonight at the trustees’ dinner. Rachel found him attractive.
The restaurant was almost equal to The Ritz in status terms. Freedland Morton really went to town, literally, for their trustees, among them aristocrats, lords, a lady and a baroness, with peremptory, stuffed-up voices and static hairdos. Michael never knew what to say to these people. They were virtually another species even as they shared his citizenship, and he always felt overly conspicuous yet circumferential in their multitudinous presence. Usually he skirted around the edges of these events, feeling too tall and dark in the middle, he would find a friend or a comfy group and chat in a corner in his cocktail party stance of palms together a bit like a priest, head down, feet level, assuming the air of someone who was commanding and entirely calm within, someone dashing and wise. As he approached the venue he checked himself – were his lapels straight? was his shirt tucked in? were his hands smooth and adequately moisturised? – wondering as usual whether he would be the only black person in the room. It was hard to believe, the ice caps melting, the crater expanding, Obama, the recession, the fact of the twenty-first century in general, that he was still asking himself this question. The last thing he did before entering was turn off his iPod, and he strode on in, ready for whatever.
The tables were to one side covered in white. On the other side people were standing around, drinks in hand, talking. There was a central chandelier and canapés, colourful paintings along the walls, and that mass murmur that rises from parties where people don’t dance and becomes louder the more they drink. Rachel was there, wearing a dress of a soft purple fabric with a belt at the waist, her long hair falling over her shoulders. When she saw him there was, he was sure of it, a moment of molten eye contact between them that made it seem perfectly natural, expected, in fact, for him to go over to her and say hey.
‘Hi,’ she said.
And like the eye contact, this particular hey and hi bore a substance of something that must be attended to, a waiting. He knew, for instance, that sometimes, in the dead of a night, she thought of him.
‘Do you know Michael?’ Rachel said to the two men she was talking to, sallow creatures in dark suits.
‘No,’ they said, all shaking hands.
‘Michael is one of the CSR team.’ She turned to him, her eyes wide open, beaming a colluding let’s-get-out-of-here beam, or at least that was how he interpreted it.
They sat next to each other for dinner. They drank Merlot. On the other side of her was Brendan from HR and on the other side of Michael was Janet from Accounts.
‘This is good wine,’ Rachel said.
Before that they’d had champagne.
‘Your hands, they’re so smooth,’ she said suddenly, as if about to touch them.
Brendan looked at Janet and Janet looked at Brendan.
‘You should play the piano,’ Janet said.
‘That’s what people always say,’ Michael said.
‘Honestly, with hands like that. Who says a man’s hands should be rough and calloused?’
Brendan looked at his own hands. They had panna cotta for dessert, and liqueurs, followed by more wine. It began to feel like they all knew each other better than they did, like Rachel was his sweetheart. At one point he even pressed her leg under the table with his leg, the way people do in films.
‘You two, you know what?’ Brendan said, pink-cheeked, referring to Rachel and Michael. ‘You two would make a very good-looking couple. Do you know that?’
Oh alcohol this most joyous of drugs.
‘I feel like dancing!’ said Rachel.
‘I do too!’ said Michael.
‘Let’s get out of here!’ cried Brendan.
It’s funny when you’re drinking how the place you started begins to feel like another day and you’re someone else. Someone not quite Michael, nor quite Rachel, or Janet or Brendan, all of them heightened, connected, turned up yet somehow muffled, walking, teetering out the door through which they had entered as themselves. Into the night riot of festive lights they went, the late Mayfair traffic, leaving the trustees behind. They ended up at the Dover Street wine bar, a place for the mature raver, lots of people in their forties and fifties in sparkly dresses dancing to assorted disco and some live jazz.
‘We are fully booked,’ the thickly rouged woman at the door said in a Romanian accent.
‘We don’t want to eat. We just want to dance,’ Janet said.
‘We are fully booked,’ she said again.
‘But look at them,’ Brendan said of Rachel and Michael, ‘they just got married. They’ve come all the way from Leicester.’
A crowd of people left so she let them in. They went down shiny, discoey stairs, the fake newly-weds holding hands for a minute, and Michael didn’t even think of Melissa all the time they were there, apart from once when he was waiting to be served at the bar and he began to feel tired and had a sudden yearning for her. He imagined arriving home to the quiet house in the quiet night, and she would be waiting for him in her cappuccino slip, reading Hemingway, smiling at the sentences, he would walk into the red, she would lay her book aside, lift her arms, and he would accentuate the smallness of her bre
astplate by laying his head against it. He could not help but compare them, Rachel and Melissa, as he returned to the dance floor with another round of cocktails, Melissa’s small breastplate, Rachel’s larger breastplate, Melissa’s smaller feet, Rachel’s bigger feet, which danced differently from the way Melissa danced. He liked dancing with Rachel, Legend was echoing in his ears, singing to him of the weakness of his nature, how the conflicting sides of him were yet to be reconciled. Her eyes, their uncommon clarity. True, naked eyes. Eyes that did not slide away like Melissa’s eyes, did not hide from him or hold anything back. Attractions like these, John said, are ordained by the angels. They are droplets of bliss to make us remember our aliveness. And should they not be followed? When the switch is turned on, should the light not be made use of, the room walked into, the carpet walked, the sheets troubled? Yes they should, Michael agreed emphatically from his tequila high. She swirled in her Cinzano high, and he watched her, her shining teeth, her cream-coloured neck. She was virtually off the hizzle. She was possibly worthy of a hundred per cent. I want to make your zoom zoom go boom boom.
‘How old are you?’ he shouted.
‘Twenty-five. How old are you?’
‘Thirty-seven.’
This aroused secret checks for compatibility, positive speculations. Next thing they were in the Christmasy street and Janet and Brendan were nowhere to be seen.
‘I’m so pissed,’ she said.
‘Me too.’
Next thing they were in a cab, going her way, east, to Whitechapel.
‘I didn’t know people even lived in Whitechapel,’ Michael said.
‘I love Whitechapel!’
‘You must be loaded.’
‘I’m not. I work on phones, remember.’
But it turns out that you don’t have to be loaded to live in Whitechapel, for there are many kinds of digs all across London to suit every budget, this a tiny flat with two bedrooms and a kitchen, living room and dining room all in one. Rachel’s flatmate was asleep.
‘Ssssshhhh,’ she said as she went ahead of him up the stairs, he studying her ankles, inferior to Melissa’s ankles, yet pleasing, stirring. So the cooker was in the same room as the sofa, and there was a smell of recent dinner, and in Rachel’s room there was a sink in the corner, like there had been a sink in the corner of Melissa’s old room in Kensal Rise, where they had first met Desdemona and Angelina. It bothered Michael, the sink. It made him sad, and he wanted to run away back to his own woman and her Hemingway. Around the sink there was some dirt where the grout had fallen away, which also bothered him, deeply. He tore his eyes away from the sink, away from anything to do with Melissa or his actual grown-up life. Here they were. Rachel. Rachel’s room. Rachel finds me attractive.
‘I’ll put on some music,’ she said. Boyz II Men lifted out from the CD player on the dressing table. They had another drink. It began predictably with ‘I don’t normally do this kind of thing …’
Their kiss was no Desdemona, no distant relation whatsoever. It was too drunken, too wet. They did not know each other, had not laughed enough together to make it comparable. On her bed was a purply-blue bedspread with ridges in it which was quite coarse and uncomfortable. They did not make it under this bedspread but stayed on top. The whole thing was fast, all the way through there was an awareness that Michael would probably leave soon afterwards. She unbuckled him, he pulled up her dress, and in the speed of it they became glorious, she straddled him, her hair brushing his shoulder. He managed, almost completely through it, to erase Melissa from the shadows of this experience. She was only a small ghost floating in the vicinity of the sink, and it was not until the end, when Rachel piled on top of him in a shuddering mass of moistness, that Melissa, and with her Ria, Blake, his mum, dad, brother and Aunty Cynthia (his father’s sister in America), gathered in an appalled congregation around the hard, purply-blue sea.
‘Oh I like you,’ Rachel said.
‘That was, wow,’ he said, into the collapsed curtain of her hair, which got caught in his throat so that he started to cough. The coughing was such that she felt obliged to roll off him, and once that was done any tenderness that might have concluded things seemed inappropriate. She got him some water, from the tap at the sink, that sink, from which he could only take a miniscule, polite sip, first because of the traumatic emotional connotations of the sink, and also because it was essentially Thames bathwater, not technically drinkable, which made him think badly of her. She covered herself in her dressing-gown and sat back down on the edge of the bed.
‘Rachel —’
‘Sssssshhh, I know. I know I know I know.’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s late.’
‘I better go.’
He quickly washed, kissed her on the cheek, found his other sock, checked his lapels, and went to find a night bus. All the way across the water into the south he felt like a shit. How would he face them? What had happened to his careful percentages system? Had he become so desperate as to engage in such seedy one-night-stand behaviour? What if she found out? What if he talked about it in his sleep? He felt sullied, frightened. The Christmas lights laughed and pulsed in his face as he walked back from Cobb’s Corner. He tried to remember what he was before, how pure he was, how righteous, to place it, but he couldn’t. When he opened the door, he was startled to find Melissa walking up the stairs in her cotton nightdress. It was 4 a.m.
‘Oh, hi,’ he said, so happy to see her nevertheless.
‘Hi,’ she said.
There was that immediate warmth between them, that first, indestructible warmth that stays even when love itself is going. She had come down for medicine. Blake had been coughing.
Michael felt the need to explain his lateness. ‘I had to get three night buses. I couldn’t get a cab. I only had ten pounds on me.’
It was the first lie of this kind, and it made him feel even shitter.
*
The Christmas tree was ruled by an angel. She had a fine kingdom. It seemed to float, above its glossy mound of presents, a mist came off of it, the magical mingling of tinsel with fairy lights, of dust and pale daylight from the bay window, of faded olive-green foliage with many colours and forms of decorative bauble. The tree was bought from Woolworths in 1978. The baubles were stored throughout the year in their original partitioned boxes in the attic until it was time to radiate and scintillate. They were planets with curly waves of gold glitter circling around. They were purple discs with pink combs at their edges. They were icicles and snowmen, foil-wrapped Santas made of chocolate, which over the course of the day were unwrapped and eaten by the various children and adults liming in the armchairs, corners and nooks and crannies of the old house. The angel sat on top of it all in a long white dress and halo, watching over with inanimate blindness.
The blindness of Cornelius, Melissa’s father, however, was animate. Pertaining to one eye, his left, a recent result of accelerated glaucoma. With his other eye he went about the usual events of his eight-and-a-half-decade life, which were pegged in a neat, supportive order along a mental washing line leading towards the final eclipse: wake up, watch television, smoke, shave and dress, smoke, watch television with lunch, smoke, watch television with dinner, smoke, go to bed, smoke in the middle of the night if happen to be awake. In macro terms there was Easter, birthdays, and of course Christmas. Christmas was the largest of these events, and although he lived alone now, it was done in the same way he had always done it, with copious papery and tinselly adornment. With just one eye, an albeit sharpening eye in the demise of its friend, and with the help of Adel, the oldest daughter, who lived on his side of the river, in the third week of December Cornelius gathered the boxes of decorations on the dining table and checked their contents. From ladders lengths of motley patterns went up. They criss-crossed the ceiling and frilled the cornices, obedient to their drawing pins, for Cornelius would not be able to handle the event of a failed drawing pin, a collapsed frill, living alone as he did, and no one ther
e to fix it for him. So they used hammers. Up went the festive Chinese chandeliers in the hallway. Over the mantelpiece went the string of Christmas cards from what was left of his family in the north, and there they all stayed until no later than midnight on the fifth day of January, that is, of course, the twelfth day of Christmas, when Adel returned to help him take them back down.
Adel had two children, Warren and Lauren, nineteen and seventeen. They always came to visit Cornelius on Boxing Day, Carol came with her five-year-old son Clay, Melissa and Michael with Ria and Blake, and finally Alice, their homeland connection and matriarch, who also lived alone now, in a little flat in Kilburn. She and Cornelius maintained a cordial communication with one another for the sake of festive family occasions like these. Long gone were the days of Cornelius’s fearsome dictatorship, when he had ruled over the house with a strict disciplinarian regime and large amounts of alcohol. Now he was just a withered, white-haired old man with high anxiety levels, and everyone did their best to pretend it had all never happened. It was a lot to handle for Cornelius, this sudden crowd of people in his space, their strange urbanesque speech, the unbearable mass displacement of kitchen items and other household wares that he desperately needed to be in their rightful places. He spent much of the time shuffling around with his walking stick picking things up and questioning people angrily about whether they belonged to them. Meanwhile he drank lots of wine, which gradually made his lips go purple, and smoked cigarettes to their starkest conclusions. The air smelt of tobacco and damp plaster. Carpets were curling from their corners, emitting tiny screams from the seventies.