by Diana Evans
‘Maybe that’s why she wears so much make-up …’
‘It’s the wrong colour as well. Next time look at her neck, you’ll see it …’
From there they went on to talk about comfort duvets, the special, very old duvet that is kept by the television and that you wrap around yourself at times of extreme pampering and hibernation, the perfect thing for this kind of weather and the very item they would both be making good use of when they got home that evening. Damian listened to them, rather he heard them, hoping that they would not try to include him in their conversation as they sometimes did. He was having particular trouble being at work today. There had been another in-lawed Sunday roast with Patrick and Verena two days ago that he was still recovering from, plus he had a headache, and he resented more than usual the irritating nature of nine-to-five existence, that you chat endlessly with the same people simply because they are stationed in your patch, that you come to know their daytime physical intimacies, Mercy’s need for regular face powder and lip balm, Angela’s chilblains and resulting office slipper-wearing, what Tom and his keen-hiker wife and their two boys were going to be doing this weekend. The snow was making everything more intense, louder, closer. He felt shut in. The heating was on too strong. The cold whiteness outside the window was both inviting and incongruous.
At 11.30 a.m. the sandwich trolley arrived, a tall silver vehicle which lately had developed a squeaky wheel. It came at the same time every day, too early, at the lunchtime of children. The arrival of the sandwich trolley was Damian’s proof that school was preparation for this kind of future, that from a very young age our training for captivity is in motion – the uniform, the fifteen-minute breaks, the ridiculous premature lunch. The sandwich trolley was the moment in his working day when he felt most strongly that his life required a dramatic change, a splintering, some kind of scandal or shock or tremor, when he most wanted to flee, to rip off his suit and run screaming from the building, and go – where? Not home, not to Dorking, but to some loose, untethered place, any kind of ocean or other country, to a transcendental sphere where breath itself was marvellous and the breeze was open and palpable and there was nothing in the way of it to make it seem irrelevant. Instead though, usually, he got up from his navy-blue swivel chair like everyone else, stretched, and walked over. The hungry huddle bantered amidst the crinkling of plastic sandwich wrappers and packets of crisps and the jangling of change, returning to their desks afterwards temporarily enlivened by the approaching meal, through which their computer screens would remain switched on, so that they could peer at them, or enjoy a moment of unbridled and legitimate net-surfing. Today Damian could not join that brief, low-ceilinged voyage to the sandwich mecca. The sound of the crisp packets and the squeaking of the faulty wheel made his head ache even more. When Tom nudged him and asked him if he was coming to the trolley he just wanted to beat him down. He looked out of the window, saw the clouds moving slowly across the firmament, and from somewhere very close, yet also seeming to come from the sky, he heard his father talking to him again, in that now frequent harsh whisper, those same seventeen words, How long will you go on living your life, as if you were balancing on a ribbon? That was when he fled.
He did not scream as he left the building. The screaming was internal. The cold, after the claustrophobic heat inside, made him shiver. And not just that, but the sharpness of everything, the enormous difficulty of each moment. He had not been to the grave yet. He had not laid flowers or knelt in the necropolis, or taken care of the boxes in the garage. He was afraid, afraid of the emptiness, of finding reflections of himself, and now they were hounding him, these small failures, so that he couldn’t think straight, and yet it was so much more than that, everything, everything, was wrong – specificities were fading, foundations were crumbling. Indeed he was walking on a ribbon, tripping, falling, with Laurence on his heels, pulling him down, along this white-cushioned southern pavement, on this alternative journey to another kind of sandwich, to Pret A Manger, which he now entered, realising, beneath his turmoil, that he was nevertheless hungry.
Damian was a Pret frequenter. He came here on such days when he couldn’t handle the trolley. Inside all was retro and metallic, silver floor, silver cabinets, silver ceiling. He stared at the sandwiches. There were other people also staring at the sandwiches, in their neat office clothes, their dark winter coats, considering what they wanted to eat in this single, special hour, this small portion of freedom. Should it be meat or fish, cheese or egg? Should he pick the sandwich that foolishly claimed not to be a sandwich by forsaking its bread, and therefore was actually a salad? Or should he just have a plain and honest salad, a Niçoise, a bean feast? He stood there in this pressured Pret cluster, which was not really very dissimilar to the one in the office, it was just less friendly. Everyone was trying to appear as though they didn’t care which sandwich they had, when actually they did care, a great deal. There was an acceptable amount of time that you could stand here for, between thirty seconds and a minute, and Damian was aware, as time passed, that his perusal was bordering on the excessive. The problem was that he was no longer staring at the sandwiches, but beyond them, into the silver of the cabinet, into the distractions and reflections there. He saw a picture of Stephanie, early this morning, putting on her dressing-gown to leave the bedroom, a reluctance in her movements suggesting defeat, dejection. He saw Laurence’s eroding dead skull beneath the earth with soil clustered around it, yet still, in the midst of all this, he was supposed to choose between chicken-avocado and ham and Pret pickle. The more he stared, the more incapable he became of choosing. He glanced around and upwards, the ceiling swayed, a sweat was forming on his neck. Next to him a black thing reached out and took a sandwich, a woman’s gloved hand. It seemed a sinister hand, he realised that he was trembling. In an attempt to pull himself together, he closed his eyes and opened them again. Then he reached out, following the movements of the sinister gloved hand, and grabbed the first thing he touched. Egg mayonnaise. He went quickly to the till and paid for it. Just as quickly, he went back out into the biting air and threw up on the pavement.
The rest of the day was spent in a smog of ongoing qualmishness, until at 5.45 p.m. he went to the station to get his train, only to find that it had been cancelled. The tracks were snow-clogged. There were red crosses all over the departure boards. He called Stephanie. He called Michael (Bell Green was only a couple of stops away and some of the local lines were running). When there was no answer on Michael’s mobile, he called Michael’s house. Melissa picked up.
*
She opened the door wearing a flared grey tracksuit with DANCEFIT printed across the chest and white cord string, and her slippers. She looked very young, yet older, closer into her face, some recent darkness around the eyes, an argument with her smile, an uncertainty. Or maybe people just look different when they’re at home on a weeknight not expecting anyone special and it’s snowing outside in February.
‘Come in,’ she said. He started apologising – the trains, I’ll be out of your way first thing, rocking up on you like this … ‘It’s fine, Damian, honestly, it’s really not a problem. Pass your coat,’ which she hung to thaw over the back of one of the dining chairs. He left his briefcase leaning against the wall by the door.
‘Where’s Michael, is he trapped as well?’
He had expected to find him sitting on the sofa or coming out of the kitchen, but there was no one, just Venus and Serena Williams playing on a news clip, mythical, like shooting stars, distant yet familiar, and the radio on in the background.
‘I don’t know where he is,’ Melissa said. ‘I mean, he’s away with work so, I don’t know.’
This was not strictly true. Michael was staying at the Queen’s Hotel in Crystal Palace, on a temporary sojourn away from unmarried life, at her request, after another argument that had started with his objection to the returning of the onion to the bedroom windowsill, but which was really about deeper things. The frost between them had th
ickened further after his confession. Michael had moved to the sofa full-time because the master court wasn’t big enough any more to hold their distance. For a while they had lived purely by the light of the children, but during that last quarrel Melissa had said, ‘I can’t take this any more. I can’t live like this, it’s making me sick. I want you to go.’ ‘What about the kids?’ Michael had said. ‘I’ll manage,’ she’d said. And so he was gone, return date as yet unspecified. Which meant it was true, in answer to Damian’s question, that she didn’t know whether he was trapped in the snow or not. He could be, there were lots of hills in Crystal Palace, a train could have come off the tracks or he might have stumbled in a ditch. Strangely these possibilities were out of her jurisdiction. For now he was not her man. He was a snowman, out there, and she was in here, in the crooked warmth, with her sleeping cubs, and now this other man, who was drifting around as if embarrassed by himself.
‘Why don’t you sit down? Sit down, chill.’ Damian took this as an order, descending into the sofa at the last pop of Venus. He couldn’t chill, though. It was weird being here without Stephanie and Michael. It was releasing all kinds of unacceptable feelings in him. ‘Are you hungry? I just ate but there’s some couscous left over if you want some.’
Couscous. Stephanie did that sometimes, cooked couscous. Couscous, Damian believed, was not meant to be eaten in the home. It belonged in North African restaurants where they knew what to do with it, so there was not much hope for this meal that she strode across the room into the kitchen to prepare for him. She put feta cheese on top of it. There were chunks of grey aubergine and carrots. She laid it out on a place mat with a glass of red wine and a spoon. ‘Thanks,’ he said, sitting down to it. He wanted to ask for a fork but he was paranoid that he might say fuck instead.
‘When I was growing up,’ Melissa said relatedly, ‘we always ate rice with a spoon and fork.’ She was sitting on the edge of the chair diagonally across from him with her leg tucked underneath her, watching him eat, making him more self-conscious. ‘But Michael and his family ate it with a knife and fork, so that’s how he always eats it. So now, whenever I’m having rice or couscous or something like that, there’s this confusion in me that wasn’t there before, about whether to get a knife or a spoon to eat it with. Don’t you think it’s problematic how when you’re in a couple you lose your grip on who you really are, on how you do things, on your own private culture? Do you know what I mean? Do you ever have this issue? I mean, what kind of a person eats rice with a knife? I don’t want my children to grow up to be the kind of people who eat rice with a knife.’
She was looking at him with genuine interest. She wanted a response. She wanted him to engage with her on this.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you definitely can’t eat couscous with a knife.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But you do need a f-fork. You always need a fork, unless it’s cereal.’
She gasped. ‘You haven’t got a fork! I’ll get you a fork. Of course you need a fork, to get the dregs on to the spoon! You see? You see what’s happening to me? I’m confused. My inner make-up has been rearranged and now I’m spoiled. It’s so sad.’
She went away and got the fork and gave it to him. He was chewing on some tough aubergine. It all tasted quite nice but the textures weren’t necessarily the best. ‘Actually, you know what?’ she said. ‘I think I’ll have some wine too, even if it is red. It’s Michael’s wine. He’s the one who drinks red. I prefer white, as you know, but I’ll have some red with you. It’s no fun drinking alone.’
It was a two-thirds-full bottle of Rioja. Soon they were chilling at the table postprandial listening to Jaguar Wright. She had a sharp, hot voice rafting over choppy beats. Melissa nodded to it intermittently as she was drinking. Damian had discreetly left a few bits of aubergine on the side of his plate.
‘Space is good,’ she was saying, in an upbeat rumination about coping with stress. ‘I like it when Michael’s away. I feel different, brighter. Even this house feels different. I’m returning to myself, experiencing myself clearly again, you know? It’s like, I’m not opaque any more, I’m stronger in fact, more positive. Positivity is the way to go – that’s what my sister’s always saying. It’s our mental landscape that holds us back.’ (Since Michael had left, Melissa and Carol had been chatting more on the phone in the evenings.)
‘Um-hm,’ Damian said nodding, because he could see that she really wanted him to get her, and he really wanted her to get that he was getting her. ‘Yep, space is the thing. Whenever you can get it, take it. I could use more of it myself. When’s he coming back?’
‘Er, Thursday,’ she lied, ‘maybe Friday. How’re Stephanie and the kids?’
‘They’re fine, they’re good …’ But he didn’t want to talk about Stephanie. He did not want to bring her, or anyone, into this perfect, warm and temporary cave where everything was just so, Melissa, all to himself, even if she was going on and on about Michael, but it was OK, it was just the two of them. They were alone together in a world of snow. Everything was still and soft. There were occasional sounds from the London outside and he liked that too.
‘OK, look,’ she said suddenly, ‘I hate lying. Michael isn’t away with work. We’re having space’ (she made quote marks with her fingers) ‘from each other. You know, space space. That kind of space. There, I’ve said it. Everything got too much so I kicked him out.’
‘You kicked him out? Seriously?’
‘Well,’ the Jaguar Wright LP ended and Melissa got up to change it, ‘I didn’t actually kick him out per se, as in, literally, with my foot. I just asked him to get out of my face for a while and he agreed. It was kind of a mutual decision in the end. I thought you would’ve known. Didn’t he tell you?’
‘No, I haven’t seen him.’
‘But I thought you were buddies.’ She found Susana Baca on the shelf and slipped her out of the CD case. The congas came in, the taps of the xylophone. In the kitchen she washed up Damian’s plate straight away so that dust wouldn’t build on it. She still had the image in her mind of Michael packing his tiny blue suitcase, the way he’d looked at her as she’d walked into the bedroom. She had wanted to lie down with him on the bed, a last holding, but he’d given her such a hard, hollow look.
From the way she was talking about it, so flippantly, Damian sensed that Melissa was fronting about Michael, that she was more upset about it than she seemed. There was a picture of them both with the children on the shelf above the television that he was trying not to look at. ‘I guess he must be lying low,’ he said, assuming the same levity in his voice, though really he wanted to know everything, all the details. He felt spurred, guiltily so. ‘Anyway, I don’t think Michael considers me a bonafide spar on that level that he’d go out of his way to call me up about something like that.’ Not that he wanted, in any way here, by thus speculating, to imply that Michael was not a close enough friend for it to be such a big deal if something were to happen here tonight, something unrighteous, something secret. No. Absolutely not. Because that would be dark of him. But if only, in this sweet snow …
‘What happened?’ he asked as she came back into the room.
‘Oh, nothing and everything. He slept with someone but that’s not what happened. It was everything else that wasn’t happening that happened.’
‘Wow. He cheated,’ Damian said.
Melissa looked at him, bemused, a little condescending. ‘He doesn’t belong to me. Fidelity is so overrated. I think it’s childish, the way people think of it.’
‘So it doesn’t bother you?’
There was a suggestion in his tone, a hint of expectation, that made Melissa see him for the first time in a different way. She noticed the roundness of his shoulders and the thickness of his waist. There was a rich warmth to him that she had always thought of as brotherly, but now it was alluring, rugged. His fingers were very thick, not smooth and elegant like Michael’s. She studied them, for long enough for him to notice. The Rioja
was going to her head.
‘If it bothers me it’s my problem, not his,’ she said.
Damian could feel a wide, foolish smile trying to take over his face and he suppressed it. It was just that he was content, being here in her company, so different from how he’d felt earlier today, and the way she’d looked at him just then had given him something, it had lifted him. ‘I think I had a panic attack today,’ he blurted.
‘Did you? How come?’
‘I don’t know. I was trying to buy a sandwich and I just … I don’t know. I freaked out.’
‘Do you know what caused it? Was it something to do with the sandwich? Michael hates egg mayo, it turns his stomach.’
She was like a record on repeat. Michael Michael Michael. ‘Sorry,’ she said, realising, as Damian got up from the table. There seemed to be a collusion emerging between them, unspoken, a secret twoness. ‘It was egg mayo, funnily enough,’ he said, turning away from her towards the bookshelves. Melissa shuddered. It was getting colder. She went to adjust the heating and wrapped the blanket off the sofa around her, by which time Damian was sitting on the floor looking through the records on the bottom shelf. His shirt had come untucked at the back. His back was like a warm mountain, thick and rotund.
‘You’ve got some classics here, man. Millie Jackson. My dad used to listen to her.’
My dad. Had he actually said that? It sounded absurd coming out of his mouth, yet he’d said it so naturally. He was shocked.
‘Why don’t you play it?’ Melissa said.
She showed him how to change the speed on the record player. Millie sloped in slinky, white with the snow in her white jumpsuit and long cape. The voice took Damian right back to a time when Joyce, he and Laurence were sitting at the table playing blackjack. It was all crisp edges and clusters of colours in his head, Joyce’s purple cardigan, the gold buttons, the flowers on the table, the orange curtain. The vividness, the immediacy of the image, brought tears to his eyes.