Original Bliss

by A. L. Kennedy

  “It’s your mind, you can think about what you like in it. And I did say I wanted to help.”

  He kissed at the top of her head. “You’re good, you are.” His face seemed terribly lonely, with a light of hunger to it. “Anyway, this may sound quite unimpressive, but I walked all the way through two different railway stations today and I didn’t buy a thing. And bear in mind that when I’m travelling I do make a habit of buying things in this particular area.” He breathed out a dull laugh. “Moral turpitude governs my travel arrangements far more effectively than any tourist agency. In Europe and America, I take an extra bag—for reports and research, that’s supposed to be— but I bring it back home full of filth, my favourite. Customs hassle me sometimes, that’s all.

  “In Britain, I have a weakness for railway stations. Well, they’re so romantic.” He didn’t smile. “And they’re where I started out, because they’re ideal. They have everything waiting for me: The Story of O, true-life sex crimes, pathology with pictures, Justine, top-shelf magazines you can buy in armfuls because no one knows you and no one cares and any possible disapproval will not stick. These places are nowhere, they don’t count, so I can be anyone I want to—be disgusting—be quite openly what I am.”

  “You are not disgusting.”

  “It’s kind and completely unrealistic of you to say so.”

  “Edward, please.”

  He laid his hand above hers and she felt him warm and then the cool of him lifting softly away. She heard him clear his throat to speak, to murmur in close at her cheek. “In Glasgow today I went from the platform and into a taxi, without even looking for the bookstall, not a glance. My hotel doesn’t have a soft-core channel. I did check. I don’t think you have any sex shops that I could search for. So I’m fairly safe. No.” He paused and let her cheek touch the shape of his mouth. “I’m very safe—you’re here. So I’ll be good.”

  She eased her arm in round his shoulders because she needed to and it also seemed the proper thing to do. Edward leaned back against her. She felt it when he exhaled, understood the sudden flex and rub of his neck. The surprising weight of his head rocked against her.

  “Tired?”

  “Exhausted, actually.”

  Helen enjoyed how comfortable and comforted she was with this man in an almost-embrace, with the shift and the change of his bones, his breath. An emotion resembling fear prickled at the small of her back, threatened, then withdrew again.

  “It’s odd.” Helen wasn’t speaking to make sense, only to be speaking, to keep some limitation between them, a boundary of words. “It’s odd.”

  “You can say that again.” Edward tried a chuckle and then they both rocked inside it together long after the sound had gone. “You did, though, didn’t you? Always thinking ahead.” The back of his neck rubbed against her again, at home with her in a sleepy, disturbing way. “Oh, Helen. You’re a good person. What are you doing here with me?”

  She turned to meet his stare but couldn’t hold it. “I’m being where I want to. And I’m not all that good. I just don’t often do what I want.”

  “Is what you want bad?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What kind of bad?”

  Something bloomed at the back of her thinking like an unpredictable pilot light. “I don’t know.”

  Although it was very gentle, very milky, she could feel Edward’s voice shake low and solid against his ribs. “You must know, it’s what you want.”

  Helen tugged her arm from behind him and sat forward to the table-top. “When I was at school, I used to read up on the sexual diseases. They were so correctly frightening; things like syphilitic aneurysms, I never forgot about them. If you had bad sex, wrong sex, then your blood vessels would balloon up in your chest and finally burst. You would explode inside because of badness; because of men and badness and that seemed absolutely fair.”

  “You only get syphilis from someone else with syphilis.” He was making an effort to sound authoritative. “I mean that’s a . . . fact.” But he ended in a stagger of consonants. “An absolute . . . Hmn.”

  “I know, I’m just saying that when I was young I was always afraid that even if I thought too much about it, about men, I’d balloon. Everyone told me how terrible sex was and how men might do anything and I would wonder about that anything—what it would be like—and then I would worry that I’d burst.”

  “But you didn’t. You can’t have thought bad enough things.”

  “I suppose not. There’s time yet, though.”

  “True. And I’m a bad influence.”

  “Yes.”

  Their silence surprised them, left them undefended, suddenly. Edward rubbed lightly at his arm and watched her face.

  They thought for a moment and then they agreed themselves into a kiss, the open-mouthed soft and hard kiss with him she now realised she’d very often thought about. For some considerable time, they were both lifted up in far too much breathing and in her touching the gallop of pulse at his throat and the soft heat at his collar and the whole, continuous shape of him while they touched—Edward not incautious, not discourteous. They did not hurry, only ached towards each other, in the grip of babbling neurones and unruly electricity.

  “Well, then.” Edward smoothed against one of her breasts very slightly as he moved to close his arms on her again; the accidental but un-accidental nice experiment. “I had hoped—” He sighed slowly so it would catch in her hair. “You must tell me what we’re going to do. Helen? Are you still here?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m—You’re very . . .”

  “So are you. Tell me. What do we do?”

  Her hands met behind his spine and she held him as if he might print himself under her skin if she gave him enough of her pressure and her time. She couldn’t, didn’t want to speak.

  “Helen. Please tell me. Either way.” Silence licked between them. “It’s no, isn’t it?” The way he said it, she understood he’d been prepared for disappointment and understood that he deserved much better, but that she couldn’t give it to him.

  She had to look at Edward very clearly, so that he would know she was telling the truth. “Everything would have to be different and it’s not. That’s the only reason . . .”

  “Does everything matter?”

  “Don’t make me argue. Please. I can’t.”

  But Edward didn’t make her argue, he shook Helen’s hand over-gently and was too polite and telephoned for a taxi to take her home even though he was a visitor to her city and must have found that slightly difficult. When he came back to their table, she saw, really saw, how well he’d dressed and made an effort for her and she wanted to make efforts back and not leave him unhappy, not leave him.

  “I’m sorry, Helen. Again. Intellectually, with people I can be . . . I can out-perform anyone. But I know I’m not good at touching.”

  “That isn’t—”

  “That’s fine. I know. Don’t worry.”

  He worked himself into his coat, struggling slightly with one of the sleeves. When she reached to help him, he stepped aside. “No. It’s okay.”

  Of course, she was too late home.

  Chapter 4

  Helen scrubbed and laundered out the reek of Edward E. Gluck, the untouchable tang of herself with him. Only her jacket remembered him clearly, she couldn’t make the time to dry-clean it, or had no wish to find the opportunity. Still, even there his scent faded; the pitch and throb at her stomach when she moved the cloth died quite away. The impossible had no shelf-life, couldn’t last.

  Cooking was the thing now—a blessing, perhaps literally. Mr. Brindle was a highly particular eater, always had been. It was necessary to please him, but beyond that basic requirement, Helen could find a certain self-expression and an occupation for her time. Her choice of menus came to rely on increasing allowances for preparation. Overnight marinating, standing, resting, proving, reduction and clarification—they all encompassed a type of waiting, a business that need not interfere with thought, or
the active avoidance of thought.

  A clever choice of dishes might see her washing up the breakfast ruins, Mr. Brindle having duly gone to work, and then inching out the whole day with tiny exercises in perfectionism. Happily, her efforts were rewarded with fairly consistent success and she could feel that she was doing her best, making a go of it, of Mr. and Mrs. Brindle, of them.

  Her peace at the dinner table was bought in little accidents. Helen gave herself more time to work, but also became more careless. Her concentration was poor and she was continually burning herself with pot lids, sugar syrup, steam. Opened cans and the good knives she had bought a long time ago—as an investment and as things to make her glad—slashed at her palms and fingers. She used the bright blue colour of dressing recommended for kitchens, because they cannot be lost in foodstuffs by mistake. Mr. Brindle made her change them when he was in the house. He did not want a wife whose hands were ridiculous.

  But he did want a wife. Mr. Brindle had taken to touching her more than she could remember he ever had. At times when she could not expect it, his arm would thump in around her waist, or he would pad up behind her and palm at her breasts. He never approached her at night now, never in their bed, but his sudden presences started to soak their home. He was like a flood. Helen would wake on the living-room floor and have to stand immediately to have her head safe above the flux and drift of something. Mr. Brindle spoke no more than usual, but left a new kind of silence, washing in behind him whenever he left her alone. The arrangements of her furniture slid towards the cramped and the uneasy, the submarine.

  Dear Helen,

  No more aversion—total abstinence. Much more to do with the Process: “more gentle and more terrible,” as I do tend always to say.

  This is my first day. I shall tell you of any others.

  I won’t lie.

  One day. Twenty-four hours.

  Love, Edward.

  And thank you for your help.

  Love. A small word like scalpel or a pocket knife. She’d never been able to write it down and she couldn’t tell from the writing whether Edward did it easily.

  Another enveloped postcard. She didn’t burn it. Too much water about in the air, it would never have caught.

  Sinners were supposed to burn, but here she was drowning instead, sinking in something that pounded up fast at blood-heat into what was already her standing pool of a house. She had never realised she was like this, had never been this kind of woman in her life. The World and the Flesh and the Devil, they were all supposed to tempt, but the Flesh had never troubled her before. Helen was not used to thinking of her own flesh and the way it would ask inappropriately for the flesh of someone else. Helen hadn’t known about undersea nights, layered with the salt ghosts of lip and tongue and touch.

  Dear Helen,

  Seven days.

  Thank you.

  Love.

  Mr. Brindle fed avidly, but never grew fat. Only dense and quiet, like a low-tide rock.

  Dear Helen,

  Almost slipped away there, but didn’t.

  Eighteen days.

  Love,

  Edward.

  If God was God, then He could see right in through her, as if she might just as well be a window or a Russian doll made out of glass. If God was God, He stood outside of time, so that everything she’d ever done was stacked up inside her for Him to count like chips she’d used to back the wrong number, the wrong bet. God knew her complete, the finished facts of all she’d do until she died, and she was either forgiven now or she was not and that was the way it would be and had been, forever and ever, amen. Whatever she did, God had watched her already, doing it.

  Now and again, as she thought of Edward, Helen’s good fear, her God fear, would tease and dazzle back towards her. Wrapping chicken thighs in smoked bacon, she had paused and understood that yesterday when she stood in the same place and stared through her ghost reflection in the same window, she had been deep in her usual, stable, lack of faith. Today she was convincingly afraid. She heard the falling sheet-metal din of Heaven’s terror on all sides, shivering and slicing with the wonderful clarity of God and then, like any storm, it passed.

  Thirty days.

  Dear Helen,

  A whole month.

  I am happy. Hope you are the same.

  Love,

  Edward.

  Mr. Brindle did not like his Greek honey pie. There was too much salt in the pastry which had been correct for the recipe but not for his tastes. He didn’t shout at her, only asked for a piece of fruit and a glass of water to clean his mouth. She went and fetched them as quickly as she could, thick currents tugging and struggling at her legs.

  Helen,

  I celebrated my month the wrong way.

  Back at six days now. Think I have learned from this.

  I let you down, didn’t I?

  Sorry, Edward. And love.

  You deserved better. I know that. I will try.

  Coincidences and earthquakes, they were acts of God. People didn’t make them happen, they happened to people. If Edward was meant to happen then Edward was an act of God. Perhaps God disapproved of her staying here and only thinking of Edward when being with Edward was God’s will.

  This was difficult to think about. Helen polished the windows with newspapers and vinegar because they left no streaks and combed out the fringes on the Chinese rug they’d bought when Chinese rugs were still expensive. It was hard to imagine that Edward was God’s intention. She would have been pleased to do God’s will, obviously, but then thinking how much she might want to would make her restless. Helen found she could be impatient to serve God.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you . . .”

  Helen was rinsing the last of the soap-suds from the kitchen sink. Out in the dark of the garden she could see the box of yellow brightness that pressed down across the grass from the lighted window. She watched as Mr. Brindle’s shadow joined hers and then swallowed it.

  “Ask me?”

  “Mm.” His chin settled in heavily at her shoulder while his hands stooped and caught at the hem of her skirt. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “What?”

  “This.” He dragged up her skirt in one hard motion, turning it out like a sleeve, so it gathered up high round her waist. Then his weight forced back against her again, covering her with the cloth that covered him and taking the balance from her legs. Something tumbled in the cupboard under the sink.

  “You don’t mind. Open your blouse. No, I’ll do it, you’re tired. I can do it right.”

  She felt the first, hot tug. Buttons chattered everywhere on to different hard surfaces. She tried to remember where she heard them fall, so she could find them later and they wouldn’t go to waste and Mr. Brindle ripped at the cloth of her blouse, dug his cold, blunt fingers under her bra and wrenched it up, squeezed at her, squeezed again, enjoyed a twist.

  “Is he out there? Does he watch the house? Where does he live?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Shut up. Can he see me now, in my house, touching my wife, having my wife? Can he see? Answer me. Can he see?”

  There was no point in saying. “Who?” There was no point in saying it, she knew.

  “Who? Who? Who do you fucking think.”

  She felt the fumble and a shearing, unlikely pain.

  “Edward. Eighteen days and love Edward. Touching my wife in the street Edward. Get her back for another fuck later Edward.”

  A final, hauling cut and release, the scratch of a raw nail from his finger.

  “Feeling better? That’s the way you like it, isn’t it? With the knickers off? Did you smell them after the last time? I did. You cunt.”

  There’d been another night, years ago, when he’d hit her more. Then, Helen knew she’d done nothing, hadn’t understood at all and so she’d been able, in a way, to defend herself. This time, she couldn’t resist him, couldn’t find the strength, because she was at fault and whatever happened, it was meant. God�
�s will.

  Lying on the linoleum in the wet of something, she kept still. To keep still was important. Invisible. She thought about invisible.

  “Cunt.”

  She felt him open her and spit.

  “Cunt.”

  She felt the beginning of the kick.

  He usually stopped because he was tired, not because he wanted to.

  Chapter 5

  “What’s the matter? Helen?”

  “Nothing.” She hadn’t thought she’d ever use his number. “I’m fine.” Even when he gave it to her, the hurt behind his eyes had told her very clearly that he didn’t believe she would call. “I just wanted to call.”

  “Well, that’s . . . thank you. I’m very glad.”

  Her breath was coming in hot gouts. There was a plan she’d made for what to say, but it was slipping.

  “That’s all right. I wondered . . . I wondered . . .” The sentence failed her.

  “Where are you? And are you okay, you don’t sound it. Where are you, Helen?”

  “Here.”

  And then she cried. It surprised Helen how very seldom she cried, but when the feeling was on her she did it a lot.

  Edward wanted to come and get her, but she made herself able to say she would go to the underground station at Gloucester Road and he could meet her. He said that wasn’t too far from his house.

  Although she had no doubts that he would be there, she worried he’d be late, or that she wouldn’t see him, or would take the wrong way out. If he wasn’t right on hand and ready to be recognised Helen knew she would start crying again and people who cried publicly in London were always mad; changing guards and ravens and the homelessly mad—that was the capital. Helen didn’t want to be homeless or mad.