“Okay.” She thought she wouldn’t move away from him just yet, because she wouldn’t be able to touch him this way again.
“No. I said ‘How are you?’ ” He finally faced her.
“Tired.”
“I stopped you sleeping again, didn’t I? Because I am a stupid bastard and sometimes it shows. I shouldn’t have—”
“I came home. I don’t sleep at home.”
“Okay. But you look well, though. Trust me, I’m a doctor. You do.” He dipped in and kissed her cheek, retreating before she could make any response.
They left the hospital together and walked the straight and Great Western Road, in towards the Botanical Gardens and the town. Artfully displayed interiors posed through drawing-room windows and Gluck was mainly silent, although sometimes impressed by the sternly grey perspectives of Calvinist pseudo-classical façades.
“This is all very nice. Not like London.”
“No, not like London. This is bad old money, but with good old style, because it’s Scotland. We have style.”
“You’re a Nationalist?”
“No, a realist. It’s just true.”
Helen stumbled through her mind for useful things to say and noticed they were practically trudging now—this was too long a walk to be welcoming or sociable. She was getting it wrong, so many different kinds of wrong.
Gluck inhaled hard. “I do apologise.”
“What for?”
“The mood I’m in. Mental hospitals make me very uneasy . . . well, furious. Which is decidedly unwise— they’re the one place where no one should seem to be in imminent need of sedation, and I always do. And it is . . . not good to be with. Very unattractive and I’d rather be . . .”
“Attractive.”
“Well, now you mention it . . . Probably. Something like that.”
“You are attractive.”
“Now I didn’t say it because I wanted you to—”
“I know. That’s one of the reasons you are. Attractive. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say.”
“No. Quite likely you shouldn’t.”
Edward began to walk a touch ahead. She hadn’t thought until now that he must have been slowing his pace down to hers.
Every time a bus churned by, Helen wanted to apologise for its noisiness, for the intrusion, for the fact that it destroyed whatever atmosphere they might have been creating. Not that any atmosphere she could think of was actually taking shape. This was her home territory, she ought to be able to welcome him and be entertaining about a place he’d never visited before, but she couldn’t. She hoped for a light inspiration that could kick off some safer, smaller talk, but nothing came. The skin above her eyes felt sensitive and tense.
“Ach God, this is awful. Oh, I’m sorry.”
She discovered she was holding Edward’s hand, soft around the curl of his fingers. They had reached a standstill and he was looking at her flatly, his mouth tight.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to say—I hate trying to make conversation. I think if you have to make it then you shouldn’t be bothering. But I want to make it. I mean I think that I do want to talk. I don’t know what to do here, Edward, do you know what to do here?”
Edward freed himself from her and then slid his hands up to touch either side of her face. He held her along the jaw and beside her cheeks, fingers mildly chill as they slipped to the start of her neck. His pressure was firm but trembled slightly. Hard under her breastbone, a type of fluidity seemed to break out; it lurched and then sparked away into a heightened, untrustworthy peace. She watched him and he watched her, because they were fixed in a position where they could do nothing else, although this was almost unbearable. When Edward spoke, Helen focused her attention on his lips to steady her concentration and found this didn’t work. He had good lips.
“Helen, we’ve forgotten we know each other. I think that’s all. No, it’s not. I’m afraid that I seem disgusting now—because of the way I’ve behaved today—”
“No, really—”
“Then because of Germany—what I told you— what I do—and I find that I care about you more when I can see you than I did when I was thinking about you and I don’t want to be disgusting and, Jesus Christ, Helen, I’m only a genius, I can’t be expected to cope with this. With being confused.” He rubbed his forehead. “I don’t like to be confused.”
“I know how you feel.”
She touched his hands for the sake of touching them and at once he let go of her face. That seemed a shame.
“Look, I was going to drag you off to the Gardens . . .”
His hands tugged down against hers as she lifted them, the palms and thumbs and fingers, all made alive and in keeping with the proportions of the man.
“The Gardens up ahead there . . . and I’d have made you look at the squirrels when they’re really just rats with a perm and cheeky to boot. I think we shouldn’t do that. I think I should go home.”
“Really?” He was trying to be unhurt, just the way he’d tried not to notice when she said home. He didn’t understand about her home and how she and Mr. Brindle would define that word in ways that disagreed.
She squeezed and tickled at his palms. “That was in the wrong order. Sorry. I’m going home because then I’ll come back out again. Right at the corner on this side of the street there’s a big hotel with a bar. You’ll find it no bother and I’ll see you in there at . . . I will try to come and see you there at eight o’clock. If I’m late it means I couldn’t get away, so don’t wait. I’m sorry to be so uncertain. I will try.”
“I understand.”
“How was your sister?” Mr. Brindle was watching the Saturday sport on Mr. Brindle’s TV set, from Mr. Brindle’s chair. “Still depressed?”
“Yes. She’s not doing well.”
Although hardly anything was different in the living-room, Mr. Brindle made it untidy, surly, and somewhere she could only intrude.
“She needs to take herself in hand. She can’t go through life expecting to be helped all the time. Even if her sister does have her heart set on playing the fucking saint.”
She could be sure he’d hardly moved since she left him after lunch: sitting, sunk into the scrappy jeans and the sweatshirt and the stocking feet. He was wearing white socks. One day at home for white socks without slippers and they’re done.
While she moved across the kitchen, she began to call through what she needed to say.
“Would you mind—”
“What does she want now?”
“I don’t have to.” She filled the kettle, switched it on, came back to lean in the doorway and stare at the back of Mr. Brindle’s head.
“You don’t have to what?”
“Saturday night on her own—it makes her feel lonely.”
He turned to her. “And it won’t do the same to me?”
“I don’t have to.”
“Ach, go on. Why not. Why not.” He waved her over with his hand until she stood beside him and he could loop his arm in tight round the tops of her thighs. “Will you be late? You don’t need to be late.”
“No, I won’t be late. I don’t have to go.”
“I can watch the film. It’s decent, for once. Give her my best. Ho, ho.”
“Yeah, right.” She stooped down to kiss him and was sure, as her lips read his cheek and she smelt sleep on his skin, that she was betraying him. To kiss and betray. She would never have thought herself so far beyond help, but there she was, bending to him with a biblical condemnation like cold leather at her back— kissing to betray a trust.
Mr. Brindle glanced up to her, smiling, and stretched to give his own, answering kiss.
Helen was dressed for visiting her sister who was not in Glasgow and could not be visited; this meant she was not dressed for Edward, or even for the hotel bar. She felt indelibly ugly as she waited for her vision to adjust from a rather beautifully violent sunset to an interior gloom. The last time she’d had to pause like this, obviously searching for someone and at risk
of disappointment, she’d been no older than twenty. Perhaps she appeared to be faking an elaborate absence of partner that would be the beginning of a come-on to the room. She knew there were glances evaluating and probably discounting her already as she tried to turn smoothly and take in all the tables where Edward might be. She was slightly late; he might have gone.
At least no one she knew ever came here, it was safe. No one she knew—she couldn’t argue with that. Mr. Brindle had made sure there really was no one she knew: only the paper-shop man and the butcher and all of the other people she paid out Mr. Brindle’s money to. She couldn’t remember when she’d given up the struggle of trying to stay friendly with the last of her friends. Whatever they’d been able to give her was never worth what Mr. Brindle made her pay. Some of the churches had called sometimes, but not recently.
“I’m sorry, did I give you a start? You looked right past me twice.”
The bar turned back to its various preoccupations and she let Edward lead her aside towards the furthest wall. A ridiculously piercing light made a tight hoop on the table-top. If they leant forward, their faces were bleached blank, or troubled with odd shadows.
“I’m late.”
“I know. I was just going.”
“Were you?”
“No. I was just preparing to spend a very long night getting maudlin drunk on my own. Tell me about how you are, Helen, all about that. Did any of what I suggested help?”
She had expected he might be angry when she told him that she’d abandoned the whole of his Process and gone back to her nights spent with death. But Edward was only sad. From time to time, she would mention a detail from her home or from the particular style of living she had made and a shiver of discomfort would close Edward’s eyes or make him stare away. He found her life far more unpleasant than she could.
If he asked her questions, they were gentle, but precise in a way that meant she answered them without evasion or concealment. Perhaps for as much as an hour, he was with her in her thinking, as if they were dreaming together, or of each other.
When she had no more to say, he let her watch him while he made her a part of his work, an element in what was the brightest and closest part of him. His expression died away to something more than sleep, a lonely consideration that took the colour and the pupils of his eyes and deepened them together into one, dark thing that saw and saw and saw. His voice sank in his chest, solid and low. He ripped pages from his notebook, covered them in tiny, regular print and gave them to her. He asked her to repeat certain instructions and orders of action and she did so, as if she were taking oaths of allegiance to a country they intended to create. Last of all, he made her laugh.
“That’s better. I don’t mind being serious, but I draw the line at solemn. And I’m tense enough as it is. Don’t want to mess up again.” He paused for an unnecessary breath. “There’s nothing else I have to suggest, but at least now I can feel I’ve done my duty properly.”
Helen dropped her head while her smile couldn’t help squeezing down into something grey. “I didn’t know I was a duty.”
He reached immediately for her hand, but then didn’t touch it. “You’re not. See—I’m messing up already? That was my duty, but you are not and now I can talk to you, instead of about you. I mean, I could have written you a letter with all this.” He prodded the pile of notes with his finger. “Couldn’t I?”
“Mm hm.”
“But that wouldn’t have been as good.”
“No.”
“Look at me. Okay. Now shall we enjoy ourselves? Would that be the right thing to do?”
Helen sat at rest while a swipe of vertigo pressed through her. She no longer had any grip on the right thing to do. She had no idea of anything but what she wanted, and what she wanted was not an idea. Considering what might stop her from doing wrong, or what might make her hold on morality even more precarious, she said, “You could tell me about you.”
“How do you mean?”
“We’ve talked about my problems . . .”
He eased out half a sigh. “I said in my letter, I’ve been trying all the nasty old tricks I’ve just spent my morning preaching against: drugs that make me sick, foul smells, electric shocks—”
“Shocks?”
“Helen, if I thought it would help, I’d sit and watch mucky videos while beating a steel mallet off my head. Any unpleasant stimulus will do. The trouble is . . . do you really want to hear about this, because I may enjoy telling you in a way that I should not.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Because you believe in confession?”
“Because I think you’re trying to be different. And maybe . . . I’m curious.”
“Curious. Well, then I should tell you everything, of course.” There was a brittle line in the way he said that. She’d forgotten how easily she could hurt him and how little she wanted to.
“Not that—”
“No, no. You’re curious, that’s fine.” He stared at the table and began a sharp, low monologue. “So I should start with what? Number of times I come in one day? An average day? Six. Everything else has to fit around that number: where I go, how long I can stay, what work I can do, what excuses I make to slip away, what possible material I can get that will still have an edge, that will still manage to stimulate me when I’ve already seen every bloody thing there is. Have you ever sat up late at night when you should have been marking papers for a third-year exam and watched a German Shepherd licking Pedigree Chum off a cunt before fucking it? Good film, terrific reviews—if you read the same papers I do.”
He wasn’t being angry with her; she had to bear in mind that he wasn’t being angry with her.
“Or the guy who loves to fist them, gets in there up to his wrist, has a preference for cunts and doesn’t mind the blood. Or actually, I beg your pardon, he likes the blood and I don’t like any of this at all, but I have to have it because anything else doesn’t work any more. I watch men shoving Perrier bottles where the sun will never shine and part of me hopes that the bottles don’t break, but only a small part, because the rest of me is watching. I always have to watch. No matter what.
“Even if it hurts. Do you know how many times I can wank before it starts to hurt? I know exactly, but that isn’t where I stop. Some drug addicts in withdrawal, they have the same problem. I’ve written monographs on it: the fascinating phenomenon of forcing yourself to shoot your load over and over again, even though every time you touch yourself it makes you want to scream. Still, I wouldn’t wish to exaggerate, that only happens every month, or so.
“And I am trying to fight it, I’m doing my best with the aversion therapy . . . Aversion—that’s a joke. I’m going through all the steps, every spell and potion for de-conditioning success, but I already loathe what I do. I can’t hate it any more completely and I still don’t stop. Jesus, I’m even starting to like the electric shocks—I associate the charges with being about to ejaculate. Still curious?”
“Of course, if you’re going to be angry, then you won’t be anything else.”
“What?”
“Mr. Brindle does it all the time: gets angry. It’s something people do instead. I don’t know what he really is, but he gets angry instead. I think you don’t want to be ashamed.”
Edward wrapped his arms tight around his ribs, exhaled and inhaled again. “Ten out of ten. Ten out of ten. You might want to add in that I would also rather not be afraid. Obviously I am.”
“Why.”
“Why?” His voice sounded tiny, surprised. “Because I don’t want you to go.”
“That’s . . . something good.”
“It might not always be.”
“Mm hm.”
“And I need you. You’re one of my cures. The best of them, in fact. Pain and nausea I know about—I know all about—but if I can talk to you, I remember it later. When I open up a magazine, when I put in a video, I remember you and I can’t . . . I get too ashamed. It’s good. To be humilia
ted.”
Edward rubbed at the back of his neck, then reached for her hand again, took it and pulled it smoothly along the table-top. Helen sat very slightly nearer while he rubbed his thumb across the root of her fingers, worked into the shallow fold of skin behind the knuckle and inside the tidy dark of her closed fist.
“You wouldn’t believe how easily it started. I was fresh back from America, very young, very promising and I didn’t have time for a person to be in my life. I was busy building myself into a genius and finding out how easy that could be and there was so little space for everything necessary, I quite frequently went without sleep. But then again I have never been devoid of feelings—sexual impulses—I’ve always had what most people have—the desire to be with someone. I’ve often wanted to love.
“I’d never thought that buying people, hiring them, would be a way forward for me; not because of scruples, I was just scared of diseases and of being caught. The books, the magazines, I could use them according to my schedule, they seemed perfectly convenient and unshameful. Naturally, at that point I didn’t quite realise I’d end up having private carrier’s lorries arriving to dump shifty, plain, brown packages, addressed for only me, at every house and research establishment I would ever be associated with.
“It has to be a private carrier, you see—Her Britannic Majesty’s mail won’t deliver my style of literature—the illegal kind. It comes under the same regulations that prevent you from posting shit. Obscene and Offensive Material.
“My life is neither wild, nor exotic, just massively embarrassing.”
He grabbed at his glass and found it empty; this appeared to puzzle him.
“Did I drink that?”
“Yes, I think you did. Edward, you want to change, that must make a difference. You’ll find out how to do it and it’ll work. You’re a genius—that’s what you’re for.”
“Yeah.” He frowned at the buttons of ice left in his tumbler, shook them.
“I wish I could help you.”
“You do help. Really—you are already helping me. I came up here without any kind of dreadful material and I’ve been okay. I made it. That’s . . . more than twenty-four hours since I looked at anything.” He searched her expression to see if she understood. “I haven’t done that in years. Obviously, it doesn’t mean too much; I could remember enough to see me through, if I tried.” She watched him frown to himself and wished he needn’t. “But I haven’t tried. I’ve been . . . quieter. I’ve been thinking about you, instead.” He brushed her arm quickly. “I mean of what you would think, your disapproval. I should have asked you if I could, though, shouldn’t I? If I could think of you?”
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