Original Bliss

by A. L. Kennedy

  Inside the car, around them, Helen was sure she could smell or feel a trace of Mr. Brindle: something at the edge of acrid and much too familiar.

  “That’s a shame.”

  “No, it’s not.” Helen knew she shouldn’t let Gluck know this. “That’s not a shame. I’ll tell you what’s a shame . . . But it’ll sound stupid.”

  “I’m sure not.”

  “It is stupid. It’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever known, but it’s how I feel, it’s how I’ve always felt.

  “I can’t stand his hair. Not the hair on his head—all his hair. He has so much hair. It doesn’t stop. From the back of his skull and right the way down on his neck it stays thick, in fact it gets thicker and then it curls up into wool, black wool. I can feel it under his shirt, springy, as if he was already wearing something else. When he sweats, it stays with him. I imagine it running and sticking on him and then he doesn’t seem clean. I don’t think Mr. Brindle is clean. When he showers, the water kind of combs the hair out flat, but then it looks worse; like fur. Animals have fur. People don’t have fur. Well, do they?”

  “I . . . some men . . . I don’t . . . have fur. Only the usual. Not that it’s . . . relevant. Not fur, no.”

  “It makes me panic sometimes when he wants to touch me.” Edward had turned to his window, away from her. “I don’t mind that, though. The first time I ever had . . . had a sexual . . . I mean, fear seems to be good for me, for that kind of thing. It can make you more aware—because of the adrenalin, I suppose. I’m sorry, this has nothing to do with anything.” Her breathing felt light-headed, strange.

  “I would have thought it was to do with you.”

  “Yes, but if I was working correctly I wouldn’t mind about him. He would be my husband and that would be all right.”

  “I see. I think I see. We’re here, by the way.”

  Helen realised the car had stopped.

  As they walked into what appeared to be an ageing warehouse, Edward moved around her, near but never touching, opening doors and clearing a path through the orderly crowd inside. He was keeping her insulated. She couldn’t tell who was in need of protection and who was being dangerous, but began to step tight in beside Gluck, as if she might indeed be incorrectly wired in some way and pose a potential risk.

  The tiny auditorium filled and manoeuvred beyond her while she let herself be eased in ahead of Gluck. Somewhere a smoke machine began to spit and bluster enthusiastically.

  “Now.” Edward sidled close between the rows of seats and put himself next to her. She was reminded again that public spaces seemed never to be designed for men of his proportions.

  “What is this?”

  “Nothing at the moment.” Gluck smiled quickly, then stopped himself. “But it will be modern dance. It always helps me think. I have no idea why and not the vaguest desire to find out. I go with the flow and watch. After I met you, I booked the seats.”

  “Modern dance.”

  “It’s just what we need now, trust me. They’re from Finland, apparently.”

  “Finnish modern dance.”

  “It’ll be a distraction. And it really will help my mind to clear. I use it a lot. How are you feeling? Be specific.”

  “I—” She took a moment to check. “All right. I feel all right.”

  “Good. You see, people don’t feel bad constantly. Not always. They simply don’t bother to monitor how they are with any accuracy. When we’re un-selfconscious, we actually get relief. But we don’t notice or remember, because it happens when we’re not being conscious of ourselves.”

  A heavy chord of electronic sound beat up through their long bones and their chairs and jarred at the gathering smoke.

  Edward inclined towards her knowledgeably, “Ah, that’ll be us starting, then. The music is usually a clue.” He fed his legs forward under the seat ahead of him and let his chin slump to his chest. Helen watched while a huddle of slender young women circled each other out from the wings and stood. They shuddered as a mass. Then stood. The smoke banked and thickened round them. A man in the front row began to cough.

  For thirty-eight minutes, Helen was aware of the movement in Edward’s breath and careful not to answer the rhythm of pressure where their shoulders couldn’t help but meet as they sat. Synthesised music shuddered her ribs, or screamed in her teeth and the seven women twitched towards and away from each other across the stage. The obscuring influence of the smoke became a blessing, albeit mixed. Helen couldn’t tell if Edward was enjoying this. She only knew he was trying not to choke on the chemical mist.

  Green lights arced through the fog as one and then another and then all of the dancers tugged at the lengths of muslin which had been keeping them more or less wrapped. The cue for their closing blackout was apparently the unveiling of the final pair of breasts. Helen felt a crawl in the skin beside her jaw. She didn’t mind the nudity, it was hardly offensive. She minded that half-naked women were happening now, while Edward was here. They made her position seem odd.

  “Come on now, interval.” Edward sneezed. “Excuse me. That smoke.” And then grinned.

  Helen waited, surrounded by closed German conversation, while Edward slipped his way back from the bar. Naturally, his height gave him a clear view across the room to her. He was trying to catch her eye, but she couldn’t let him.

  “There you are.”

  She gripped the damp of the glass, avoiding his hand. “Thanks. So this is the interval, then.”

  “Yes. But another two sections to go . . .” He laughed suddenly, as if someone had shoved the sound through him. His head tilted back and to the side and he unsteadied his feet in a kind of private confusion that seemed peculiarly young. “Oh, I am sorry. You can’t stand it, can you?”

  “Well—”

  “Of course, you can’t. Because it was total crap: so bad it was almost hypnotic. That’s what I love about bad dance, it’s utterly, utterly meaningless and wonderful to think against.” He was checking her face to see how upset she was, trying to say what she would agree with, trying too hard. “And there we had a perfect example. Not one redeeming feature. Bad music, bad dancing and, Jesus Christ, bad smoke.”

  “But on interesting themes.”

  “Hm?” She’d made him puzzled. She’d made him stop.

  “Themes—constipation and electrocution. That’s what it looked like, anyway.” He bent into another sudden yelp. She’d made him laugh. She liked him laughing. “From Finland? Seven dancers?”

  “Mm.” He wiped his eyes.

  “You know what that would make them?” The last word came out as a squawk, but she couldn’t laugh yet because that would stop her speaking.

  “What?”

  “The Seven Deadly Finns.”

  Edward wheezed and then whimpered while he shook his head and she couldn’t help doing much the same. He patted her shoulder and buckled again. The other dance connoisseurs edged away from them, unimpressed.

  Edward took a long moment to lean on her arm. “That’s dreadful. That is the worst thing I’ve heard in years. Oh God, I can’t breathe.” He smothered a giggle. “Can I take it we won’t be going inside for instalments two and three.”

  “Not unless you want me to swallow my own arms in despair.”

  “Dear me, no. And maybe they’d make us look at more breasts. That was too many breasts.”

  Her answer was overly fast, “Only the usual number.”

  “What, two each? Yes, but fourteen, all together and with bandages . . . I’m not used to that.” He pondered the floor. “They didn’t . . .”

  “Bother me? No. Not at all.”

  “Good. I wouldn’t have liked them to.”

  Once the warehouse bar had emptied, they found seats and Edward bought her another drink.

  “Only soda water, this time.”

  “Yes, I quite understand.” He squinted down at her contentedly. “Don’t want to get carried away. Clear head.” And, having turned away, “Nice to see you laughing.”
>
  “Hm?”

  “I won’t be a minute. You take a seat.”

  When he came to sit beside her in the still of the room, free from obstacles or constrictions, he began to take his own scale again. His movements became more fluid, graceful.

  “Do you know how tall I am, Helen?”

  “No. I suppose, really quite tall . . .”

  “Quite. Six foot three-and-three-quarter inches. Observers may not be clear on the detail—those extra three quarters—but I’m not exactly a secret I can keep. Helen, I can change my mind, I can turn the inside of myself into absolutely anything. I’ve taken Quantum Field Theory—the maps it makes for the universe and matter and time—and I’ve turned it back in to chart the brain that thought it. I’ve taught myself how to know the answer and let the question find itself. I’ve made me a genius. But I can’t be any smaller than I am. It used to annoy the hell out of me.”

  “You look good tall.”

  “Haven’t got much choice, have I? Thanks, though.” He rubbed at his neck. “And I’m used to it now. At school I was taller than my teachers, I stood out in crowds at my universities. I stood out. Jesus, I had to be a genius so people wouldn’t go on about my height. And you know what I actually wanted? Hm?”

  “No.”

  “To be good.”

  “Good?”

  “Well, don’t sound quite so surprised—it could have been possible. At one point. I wanted to be a good man—the way that James Stewart was good. You know—James Stewart? I think I’ve seen most of the films that he made, maybe all. Even the one with Lassie.

  “Nobody ever noticed he was tall and skinny. They didn’t look down Main Street after Destry rode again and say, ‘Bloody hell, he’s a bit tall, isn’t he? Spidery. Clumsy, too.’ No, they all said, ‘What a nice man.’ ‘What a good man.’ Because he was.

  “People loved Jimmy. I did. I do. Like when he’s George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life? Good old George. And aaaw, the good old Building and Loan.” He let out an impressively recognisable crackling drawl, then couldn’t help a grin.

  “That’s the only impression I do—practised it for years. That character Bailey, you stick with him, like you do all the time with Jimmy. You want the best things to happen to him, nothing but happiness. When he’s down, you stay with him because he might need company and when he’s up again you’re glad to see it because he makes you feel generous and you believe he could have a guardian angel to keep him from suicide and perhaps it’ll notice you. Jimmy’s special.”

  Edward beamed, unashamed.

  “You stay with him in that story to the end and it’s all good—even the badness is good. Even when he makes mistakes, they’re good mistakes and he can mend them.

  “I do tend to wonder—if I’m not careful—just how well I would measure up if my guardian angel delivered me into one of Jimmy’s lives. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t come off well. I’m not good—only tall.”

  He was fishing for a compliment, so Helen thought he might as well get one. “You’ve been good to me.”

  Edward shook his head solemnly, “Doesn’t count.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I wanted to.”

  She nudged his forearm and found that she was grinning and frowning without those actions being contradictory. “All right then, your work does good. When people use the Process, they needn’t be hospitalised all the time, or drugged. You let people be happy. And you refused to work for the army.”

  “You’ve been doing your research.”

  “Only now and then.”

  “That’s okay, they can’t touch you for it.” He allowed himself a strange, quiet smile. “And you’re right, I couldn’t work for the army. But then nobody sane ever could. My God, you can’t imagine what they wanted me to do. I mean, they would have loved our Finnish friends—deafening noise, chemical smoke, a sealed white box full of threatening figures— just the thing to soften you up before they ask your life away.

  “Seriously—they would try anything. Because they do understand that the enemy they most have to conquer is in between their ears. We all face the same puzzle with that—except that some of us are explorers and some of us are bombers and some of us are speculators on property we do not own.”

  “You explore.”

  “Yes. But not because I’m good—just because it’s the loveliest thing to do.”

  Their hands were already loose amongst the glasses on the table-top, it was very easy for them to find each other and fasten, hand over hand over hand over hand while Helen felt a rattle of alarm, like a stick drawn fast along a hard fence. Very far away, her Old Love was observing. Her Maker. She watched her fingers, pale and small in comparison to Edward’s.

  “Edward, I don’t mean anything by this. It’s only reall—”

  He was nodding before she could finish, “I know.” He began to lift her hands, “I don’t mean anything by it either.” Steering her up and apart from their table to a point where they could stand, hands now in a knot between them. “Of course I don’t.”

  Helen moved through her thinking and was almost certain that she was nothing but concentration and memory and the possession of an open, hopeful mind. He was a good man, despite what he said, and he would give her an answer and that would be all. First the trust to touch each other, that relaxation, and then the answer when she was sure to be listening. That made perfect sense.

  “I mainly wanted to make it clear,” he unfastened her hands, only to slip inside them and hold her by the shoulders, “that you are an extremely good person and in here,” leaning forward now, cautiously, “in here,” he kissed her forehead, with a moment’s release of static energy. “In here, you have everything you need to get better. In this part of a part of a second, you have it all. That’s reality, not wishful thinking.

  “Not that I don’t like . . .”

  Helen, because of a small discomfort she had in her arms, an idea that things should be other than they were,

  “. . . wishful . . .”

  pulled him in to rest against her,

  “. . . thinking.”

  A button of his shirt was at her cheek along with the slow heat of him. “In fact I like wishful thinking a lot. Hello, there.” She could feel his voice, burrowing through him.

  “Hello, sorry.”

  “Don’t mention it. Are you scared again?”

  “No. I don’t think so.” While her heart lunged against her, amoral and unlikely.

  “Good.”

  When the audience straggled out from the auditorium again, she and Gluck stepped away from each other smartly and then stood, uneasy within their new distances. Helen thought they should speak, but they didn’t.

  In the dim interior rock of another cab, Helen was quite aware she was returning to her hotel, but she seemed able to face her arrival and the way time would then press on. The thought of her life, outside and waiting, was no longer impossible. She tried to imagine turning off the light in her room and letting the nothing fall into her head where it could hurt her, but she couldn’t believe that as her future now.

  Edward nudged her shoulder, “All right?”

  “Mm hm.”

  “I’ve had a good evening, by the way. Thank you. I don’t do this very much. Socialising.”

  “I would have thought you did it all the time.”

  “Then you would have thought wrong. Public faces for public places—not really me. As you might have noticed, I sometimes just want to be offensive when I’ve had too much handshaking stuff. It makes me grumpy. But of course, I’m such a hound for the limelight, I couldn’t walk away and be private—I’d pine.”

  “That would be awful.”

  “Yes, I pine extremely badly.” He coughed tidily and, when he raised his head again, was serious. “But that isn’t what I want to talk about.”

  So now he would tell her, he would give her help. That would be fine, what she came for. All the way to Stuttgart and no stopping her, like he’
d said. She would get what she came for and she would be fine.

  She turned for his shape in the dark. “What do you want to talk about, then?”

  She could feel the press of him looking, holding the look.

  “What do you want? Edward?”

  “Want? To say the things I already should have. I’ve spent all night, telling you nothing of any particular use. Partly to have your company . . .” He flinched his head a little. “But mainly because I don’t know what to offer for the best. You should have the best—you’re the kind of person who always should. Do remember that, won’t you?”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t have much I can tell you.”

  “That’s all right.” It was easy to listen in the dark without having to worry how her face might change as she heard what he had to say.

  “When my mother died, I was over at UCLA. There was no warning and nothing meaningful that I could do. I flew back home and did my funeral duty for other people, but not for her. My father wasn’t there—he’d committed suicide maybe seven years before. Had Parkinson’s Disease and he couldn’t face the way he’d go. Now I could have helped him with that. If I’d wanted to.”

  Helen hadn’t heard that edge in his voice before.

  “When I went back to the States, all my mourning performances done, there was no one there. No one for me. Before, no matter what happened—right or wrong—my mother was around. I didn’t worry her for most of the time, but she was always a possibility of help. I could call her and not really talk about anything, only hear her being herself and that would be enough. I’d put down the phone, sure of what I should do.

  “You have to remember, she was the woman who saved my life. Often. My father would have killed me, but he didn’t. She got in his way. We both know about losing things, hm?”

  As if her presence was part of his thinking, he didn’t seem to expect an answer, but she spoke because he sounded lonely. “That’s right.”

  “I’m not upsetting you?” His voice sharpened in concern.

  “No. Unless you’re upsetting yourself.”

  “No.” He twisted slightly to face her through the dark. “For a long time after her death, I was numb; absent but functioning.” Helen nodded without thinking—she knew about that one. “So I started to talk to my mother in my head. I began to live—far more than I had while she was with me—according to what I imagined might be her wishes. I have to say, we’ve parted company since. And it was my loss. But that way of thinking about her and getting myself through is still available to me and would still work, I’m sure.”