by Diana Evans
‘“You have?” Johannes said. “Wow, that’s ace! I thought I was really done for then. After that time in Mendoza, Argentina, when my nose fell off, I didn’t think I was going to get any more chances. I thought I was going to have to hop to the nearest hospital holding my foot. Wouldn’t that have been a drag! So, what do you want me to do?”’ said Pete.
Damian had his turn, then Michael flashed the godmother’s wand sending Johannes back to Leytonstone, and Damian giggled as Melissa told of how glad he was to be back in the hood, but the price he’d paid for his freedom was that he had two left feet and limped. Michael’s arm was slung lazily over the back of the sofa behind Melissa, she was leaning against him, but she kept gazing out at Damian in such a way, or so he thought, that he felt incapable of going upstairs and leaving the two couples to their own private games of love. She seemed to be speaking to him with her eyes, asking him for something.
‘So you know what he did?’ Hazel said, yawning again, for she wanted to go into her room now and eat Pete.
‘What?’ they said.
‘Oh, I can’t think any more … OK OK, he went to the nearest barber, with his funny limp, and said he was looking for work. The manager gave him a job cleaning the floors and the customer toilet. Meanwhile, Johannes’ parents were really worried.’
‘Indeed!’ Michael said, ‘For they hadn’t seen their son in six months, and they didn’t believe the police’s institutionally racist theory that he must have run away from home, seeing as he’d had an important football match the day after his disappearance.’
‘And so –’ Melissa began.
‘Oh sweetness, come to bed, it’s time for gravity.’
‘Oh, I see. Now you’ve had enough. You’re not allowed to go to bed until the party’s over. Your rule.’
‘Who said the party’s over?’ Hazel was standing now holding Pete’s hand, her drink in the other. ‘Come on, hon, let’s chip,’ and Pete let himself be dragged up. He followed her, hazy, shiny looks on their faces, staggering as they went. He put his arm around her to steady them both as they bid their goodnights. They looked so rich and young together, as if gravity could not hold them even if it tried, like rustic angels, untouchable by mortal concerns, and Michael remembered that this was what love could do to you. He asked Melissa if she was coming up.
‘I might have some chamomile first,’ she said. Actually she wanted a cigarette. She felt like smoking a cigarette with Damian, in the snow cocoon.
‘OK, peace.’ Michael touched Damian on the fist. He didn’t look at Melissa again. Soon she could hear his footsteps in the room above, a silence, a familiar waiting. She didn’t want to go.
Outside Damian lit up a Marlboro Light. He would have just this one smoke, he told himself, and then he would go to bed. It wasn’t right, what he’d been thinking before when they were dancing. It couldn’t happen, not here, not now, not ever.
‘Have you got a spare?’ she said, coming out to meet him. He felt her before he saw her. The stars were very bright. Pure silver, cyclical. Night clouds moved across them in a soft wind and then they shone out alone, brighter than anything. ‘Thanks,’ she said, blowing out. She slipped her arm through his and leaned her head on his shoulder. They watched the sky.
‘I like you, Damian. You’re on my tip.’
He didn’t move, didn’t speak, just concentrated on getting to the end of his cigarette and remembering what he was supposed to do next. There were two Melissas, he was coming to realise. There was the one who lived in the world, outwardly, who was bold and mocking and a little ruthless, and there was this other one, who was quiet and uncertain, much softer. He liked this one more, though it could not exist without the other. It was the price for the other.
‘Can I tell you another secret?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I don’t want to go home.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘There’s something bad at home.’
‘I know.’ He put his arm around her. It was close, innocent, like last time.
‘You always understand,’ she said. ‘You never try and solve anything. I can’t always explain how I feel or why I feel like that, or what’s wrong, just that something’s wrong. You’re the only one who seems to –’ She was looking at the swimming pool, the water, the lines on the surface moving with the breeze. It made her think of the dream: he was holding her body, they were surrounded by coldness but she was warm. How loose and oblivious the water looked. ‘I want to be free,’ she said in a strange murmur. ‘I wish we could just be free. Why do we live this way?’
She was out of herself, and too deep inside herself, but he did understand. He understood completely. He said, ‘How long will we go on living our lives as if we were –’
‘– balancing on a ribbon,’ she finished.
‘What? Hey, what did you just say?’
But she was walking towards the pool. It was calling to her, the dark, silent water. She didn’t stop, even when he asked her where she was going, what did she mean, how did she know? It felt as if she were inside him, even as she reached the edge, as she slid in in her pretty polka-dot dress, which billowed around her, that they were connected by this ribbon, which was white and silk and strong. She gasped at the cold water against her skin, laughing, and even then she was inside him, her mouth wide open, even as her face went under and came back up.
‘Hey, be careful. Don’t drown on me.’ He was standing at the edge. His voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere else.
‘It’s lovely. It’s f-freezing. Come in.’
She beckoned, with both arms, like a child, and held in her spell he sat down on the rim. It took him longer to go in, every inch of the ice was shocking, excruciating, but soon he was submerged. He was swimming, sliding through, trying to get warm, laughing with her, and there was nothing between them any more, nothing to say that it was wrong. They were free. The ribbon was broken.
He came close to her. He tried one last time to hold it back, but the next thing he was kissing her, and she lay back in his arms, afloat, curious. She opened herself to his mouth. Why not go and look for a cousin of Desdemona, some strange and waiting kiss, some sister of her friend or some friend of her sister? She went with him and he engulfed her as she had wanted him to, his thick hands slipped under and followed her skin quickly and with fear. It was a kind of gorgeous dreaming, a fantasy unfolding. They entered the dark possibility, and for a little while it still glittered, the warmth and the revelation of it, but what they ultimately found was that there was less there than they had thought there would be. There in the ice, hungry, fast, he was no kind of freedom, and she was no kind of saviour. His tongue was rough, unknowing, his stubble scratched against her face, and when he was inside her under the water she wanted it to stop but couldn’t find a way to tell him, she was embarrassed, it seemed already too late, so she let him carry on, she turned to stone. While it was happening she thought of Simon, that boy from all those years ago when she was young, that there are people who touch, who should not touch, and once they touch, all their talking is ruined. That is how it was.
13
THIS IS IT
Sometimes in the lives of ordinary people, there is a great halt, a revelation, a moment of change. It occurs under low mental skies, never when one is happy. You are walking along on a crumbling road. The tarmac is falling away beneath your feet and you have started to limp, you are wearing rags, a cruel wind is blowing against your face. It feels as though you have been walking for a very long time. You are losing hope. You are losing meaning, and the only thing keeping you going is that stubborn human instinct to proceed. Then, immediately up ahead, you see something, something bright and completely external to your own life. It is so bright that it makes you squint. You see it. You squint. And you stop.
For Damian, this happened on the morning of Thursday 25 June. It happened in the television. A thin man stepped on to the road and centred himself in the middle of it. He ha
d black shoulder-length hair and a pale unnatural face. He was wearing a pair of glittering electric-blue trousers that ended just above the ankle, white socks and black dancing shoes. From his thin, bone-coloured torso hung a jacket of the same glittering blue. He stood there in Damian’s path, blindingly bright, blue fabric shimmering, ankle-swingers swinging, one white hand raised almost in beckoning, and Damian stopped walking. He saw him. He squinted. And he stopped.
*
On this morning of 25 June, he woke up late for the third time that week. The house was empty. The children had gone to school, Stephanie had taken them there, and then, he assumed, she had gone somewhere else, somewhere wherever he was not, which was now her way. When Damian was in the living room, Stephanie was in the kitchen. When Damian was in the bedroom, Stephanie was in the garden, sweeping the patio at strange hours, pruning the petunias to unbearable perfection. The garden was looking so good now that Damian felt he hardly had a right to be in it, let alone smoke in it, so he still smoked in the driveway, like a fugitive, late at night, and Stephanie didn’t seem to care. She never looked straight at him at the dinner table any more, though since Avril’s panic attack she was also extra careful to not let it be obvious to the children that there was a wall between them, resulting in occasional pseudo eye contact, she would look at his eyebrow instead of his iris, or sometimes perhaps his eyelid. She would say something like, Summer, tell Daddy about that experiment you did today. And Summer would tell him, there would be a strained, dull listening in which Damian was trying to appear genuinely fascinated, and when he had finished expressing this fascination with something like, That sounds really interesting, I wish I could have been there too, the conversation would turn back into the livelier, happier avenues they all preferred. Or so it seemed to him. He was an outsider, a ghost at the side of the house in the dark, risking cancer of the lung.
Did she know? he wondered, the first thought that entered his head every morning. There were no longer those initial moments of pure, thought-free consciousness that precede full wakefulness, which surely everyone deserves. No, it came straight away, every day – did she know? Was she waiting for him to confess, and the longer he didn’t confess the angrier and more prone to divorce considerations she would become? Or did she not know, and she was angry about something else? Was she just tired of him and considering divorcing him anyway? Divorce. It seemed such a hefty, catastrophic thing for a person to go through. It didn’t seem so revolutionary and dynamic any more, only scary, and not for him. And if she didn’t know, to continue with this anxiety-fuelling line of questioning, should he tell her? Should he? Or should he let it slide? Would she even care if he did tell her? Was it such a big deal anyway? He didn’t know what to do. He was stuck. The road was hard. The tarmac was crumbling. He was limping. He was wearing rags.
Specifically, a pair of old Nike shorts and a dirty white vest. Underneath the covers he was sweating. It was unusually hot outside and had been for days, a feverish, scorching kind of heat that made normal life seem ludicrous, where the only thing to do was to lie down and bathe in it, to drift, to dream hot blue oceanic dreams (of which, incidentally, he was having nothing of the kind. He was having frantic, terrible dreams, last night, for instance, of his head being cut off and then the head turning into Melissa’s head). Plus he was having headaches. And he knew, with a quiet shame, that he smelt bad. He needed to shower (yesterday he had not been able to). He needed to get dressed and go to work. But all of this seemed impossible today. He couldn’t go to work, because of all the things he had to do beforehand. Every easy thing seemed difficult and every difficult thing indistinct. The only possible thing was to have a cigarette, and it was this, this first matutinal craving, that finally gave him the motivation to fling off the covers and sit upright. For a little while he stared at the wall in front of him, the violet colour that Stephanie had chosen, within it a photograph of a short pier going out into the sea, which was grey, misty and mysterious; someone had just jumped, or someone was about to jump.
The cigarettes were downstairs in the vase cupboard. He wanted to smoke here, upstairs, with the curtains drawn, but he was afraid of Stephanie finding out. She might come back at any moment, or she would smell it, and that would make things even worse – she had always despised the smell of cigarette smoke. Damian was realising now, in this cold ostracism from her love and tenderness, that Stephanie’s love and tenderness, and that ability of hers to transmit contentment, were a warmth in his life that he wanted. He had forgotten this. He had shunned her comfort. She had been there for him, when Laurence died, open and giving to him, and he had turned away, and now she was closed and hard-edged and he was a lone thing with nothing to hold on to. In the thick smog of his self-pity, barefoot, greasy and over-stubbled, he dragged himself up and went out on to the landing. The fact of daytime accosted him as he went downstairs, the light streaming in through the stained-glass window, the post lying on the doormat, an accusing symbol of industriousness and full functionality. In the kitchen there was a note from Stephanie: Gone to work. So should you. The time on the radio said 10:13. He would have to call in sick again, and he would, just as soon as he’d had his cigarette. When he lit it, standing outside by the back door, he inhaled deep and long the sweet small oblivion. Things were better for a minute. The garden was beautiful. He would find his way back into it. He would play with the children in the grass later. He would mow the lawn, be deserving of them again.
It was over too quickly so he had another, then another. Cancer would come, he knew. It would come on a Tuesday, because Tuesday was a cancerous kind of day. With the tar thick in his throat he came in from the sun, realising that he was hungry, he wanted toast, some coffee. He filled the kettle, put two slices of bread in the toaster and wandered into the living room, where he sat down on the blue calico sofa and switched on the TV. That was when it happened. There it was. The road. The thin man shimmering. A white hand, a turn in the leg. Music.
Michael Jackson was on every Freeview channel. He was the news, the music, the drama and the ads. He was turning on an axis in his fast and shiny shoes. He was dancing along a street at dusk after a girl in a tight dress, slinking down the Smooth Criminal stairs in a white tuxedo. A thousand pelvic thrusts. Flying sparks of skittering white socks. Idiosyncratic wavings of famous sad white glove. And then, not so mobile. Now the flashlights, the blue incandescence of sirens. A stretcher in a courtyard with a thinness on top of it too slim to be a grown man but which was Michael. The head was covered. The stretcher was going into the back of the ambulance. There were pills, bad pills, and a bad doctor, and he was dead.
Damian watched, stunned and shaken, as the songs played one after another, video after video, already history. The rolling skies of What About Us. The opening of the creaky door into Thriller, all the darkness of that song – his favourite bit, the heavy breathing to the beat of the music when Michael has just turned into the footloose zombie and the choreography begins. Michael Jackson understood the nature of evil, its presence all around. He understood that in being required to live side by side with it, we must learn to wear its cloak, to recognise it within ourselves. He knew that he had a demon inside of him and he knew that it was the stirring, delicious energy gathering within him when he sang and when he danced. The music was what named him. It was bigger than him. And now the music was finally stepping out from behind the terrible ridiculing shade of its creator. It was pure, loud, enrapturing, forlornly celebrating. Neverland was crowded with criers. The air was without Michael. He was ascending upwards, moonbound for his last act, the hypnotising feet, a jazzful ballerina. And it was only now, finally, with all of this exploding before him, that Damian fully understood and recognised what it meant that his father was dead. It struck him with a new nakedness, a jolt in the gut. He was dead. He was memories and dust. He would never see him again. He felt the true clarity of this absence, the permanence of it, and tears came rolling down his face.
For two hours he sat
there, watching, the need for toast obliterated, all thoughts of work forgotten. He watched, snivelling, the talking about Michael, the dancing feet of Michael, his memories flooding back, these songs that had played through the dark rooms and tenement hallways of his childhood. Aside from the books, music was the second education his father had put to him. They had listened together, and danced for a time in the days of Joyce. They had watched together the gradual disturbing change, how he had moved further and further away from himself, trying to draw for himself a new face, if he could only finish getting rid of the old one. The more Damian watched, the more it seemed that it was Laurence’s face staring out at him from the screen. He thought of him walking along Railton Road in his rumpled clothes, lying in the hospice on that final night, with that bruised, disappointed expression in his eyes. While remembering these things, an idea came to him. It was such a strong, clear, complete idea that when it struck him he felt a flash of joy. It was an idea that must be dealt with immediately, before it ran away. He knew exactly what he had to do, exactly where to begin. He stood up. Rather, he rose.
First of all, he went to the cupboard where his old manuscript was kept, found it and threw it in the outside bin. He did not read it, not a word of it. He must not look at anything else, not a single word or piece of paper that might distract him. He must do only one thing – actually, a series of things. He went back upstairs, took off his shorts and dug out the old peddle-pushers he used to wear when he was writing in his bedsit in Kennington. They were too tight, especially around the belly, but they were still the right length, just below the knee. Next, he threw the vest he was wearing into the washing basket – things to tend to later, along with brushing his teeth and having that shower – and replaced it with a red T-shirt. On his feet he put nothing. No socks. He remained barefoot as he went to collect from the bathroom the basin that Stephanie used for her home pedicures on Fridays. This he filled with cold water, the colder the better.