Naked City

by Anthony Cropper

  ***

  She’d been sat there for an hour, parked opposite Queen’s Court. Just watching.

  Lower Briggate – being the gay end of town – is not exactly brightly lit, but even so, I’d seen her sitting there. Well, it was the big Audi that I clocked first of course - not that many posh cars dare to park down this way. But I’d clocked her too. Into her forties, a bit on the rail-thin side, but still taking care of herself. Tall – I could tell even though she was sitting. Blonde – but definitely not out of a bottle. And definitely not my sort. And that’s why I clocked her. Cos I’d decided to throw in the towel with going for ‘my sort’. So I clocked her – did I say that already? Well, she stood out like the proverbial. Trying so desperately to be invisible. Sat there in shades for godssake. On Lower Briggate. In February. At half eleven at night. Even I don’t pose quite that absurdly. And the positioning of the car was a dead give-away. Especially her edging it backwards when the Fiesta behind her pulled away – that way she could get a clear view into the Queen’s courtyard where, let’s face it, quite a bit of the action goes on…or rather goes down.

  So, I decided to give her a bit more of a floorshow. Told some of the tastiest guys and gals who were inside to strut their best positions outside. Grumbles of course – this is February, and Leeds is hardly St Tropez. But I’d got a free bag of whizz from Daniel for his latest web redesign, so I doled it out liberally and they complied. And she got her fill. Or so I’d thought.

  But there she was the next night. Greedy - I thought. So I slipped out the side way and came stalking up on her blind side while she’s guzzling in the view waiting for some more action, and in I slips – passenger door unlocked. Clearly she’s not a local. No-one in their right mind would do that on Lower Briggate.

  And she turns round all fear and indignation and her mouth open. So I snogged her. And I expected a bit of a fight. But she just – well, I thought she just sort of relaxed. But turns out she passed out – straight out. Off like a light switch. Weird. But quite sexy in a bizarre sort of a way.

  I couldn’t get her to come into the club when she came round a few seconds later. She was too busy rolling round all those delicious Kraut consonants, telling me she seems to have lost her way and is just a businesswoman and she wants to just find a restaurant to eat. At nearly midnight? I ask. All wide-eyed innocence. And besides. What were you doing here last night then? And do you know, she blushed. I thought no-one did that anymore. I thought it was just kind of Victorian or something. But up she rose, all rosy and bashful. Well sexy. And I says - I thought you Krauts had a lot more bottle – you’ve invaded the world twice after all. She looked shocked. Hurt even. So I laughed – to show her it was a joke…sort of.

  ***

  Afterwards we sat, each in her own aloneness, an enormous half-metre between us on the back seat. Each in her own bubble-world – mine of fears and doubts. Hers? I had no idea. I remember hoping that this was cool, a good laugh. Because, after all, how could it not be? I’d just earned a hundred quid from Sals and Nic after all. This was what it was all about, wasn’t it? Having a wild time. A good laugh. A good laugh.

  And so we sat there. Her pulling occasionally at the hem of her washed-silk skirt. Us both listening to the disjointed, but deepening frog chorus of the bouncers punctuated with drunken screeches as ladettes fell off their trotters all up and down Boar Lane.

  And all I felt was bewildered, which felt all wrong – and bizarre. Me? Bewildered? What was all this about?

  It had been a dare. Sals and Nic betting me a donkey I wouldn’t go out there and have her on her leather upholstery. Sals had brought up the Kraut bit. Go on – do your bit towards reconciliation. And we’d nearly pissed ourselves laughing. It would be a real blast. A good laugh. Sals had spotted her Audi, her tall smooth height, her tiny Catholic cross. Her consonants had simply confirmed her Teutonicness.

  It wasn’t meant to mean anything – to anyone. And yet here we were forty-eight hours later. Here we were. Es muss zusammen uns bringen.

  I’d moved out of Moortown years before, and horrified my parents on my next visit back – swathed in a Palestinian headscarf, clutching my plastic Buddha handbag, and talking about my new all-day-Saturday job. Mum had wept and gone to re-polish the kosher crockery. Dad had yelled at me in Yiddish and sworn at me in German and begged me in English. I’d said I was fed up with the silences and all the stored-up stuff and that they had to move on, and - if they couldn’t - I had.

  I’d learnt T’ai Chi, read the Koran, was a regular at Leeds Parish Church carol concert, been to classes about the Ba’Hai faith, written a humanist funeral into my will. And here I was standing in a German Catholic dyke’s shower having flashbacks to the concentration camps and wanting to hack this tender woman to bits and force out of her that her Dad had been in the SS and and and and cry. Which I did, spluttering out the pain au chocolat, sobbing wildly and running round and round her flat. Wailing - until long after her arms closed round me.

  ***

  It’s late again. The Velux above us has turned into dark velvet. A roadsweeper chugs and fizzes its brushes up a silent Vicar Lane, snuffling amongst the empty cans and chip-papers. The World Service is just a low burble. And she is leaning over me, parting my lips with the tips of her neatly manicured fingers. She feeds me a square of slightly melted Ritter-Sport Schokolade. Joghurt flavour. I’ve always loathed this stuff - I’m definitely a Yorkie girl - so how come it tastes so good?

  And how come, with this woman who I barely know, I’ve just had one of those once-in-a-blue-universe orgasms – the ones that leave you unable to move, or speak, or even breathe very well. And that don’t seem to be anything to do with any of your separate bits - but are a definition of that strange truism: the sum of the parts being greater than…. It infused all of me – in fact filled the whole room, the whole flat, poured out of her sixth floor windows, overflowed down the pocked and rusting fire escape, filled the graffitied courtyard till it was a huge square bowl of glistening silver, then mercuried out over the roofs to waterfall down and down, crashing in massive waves along Vicar Lane, down Kirkgate, belting into the market’s entrances, burrowing up through the Arcades to sluice through Briggate, smashing Harvey Nicks glass frontage, tsunamis chasing to catch up with each other till every street in central Leeds is submerged in silken water, just the two gold owls hooting out the submarine presence of the Civic Hall. And the whole thing just reverberates on and on, out and out – like soundwaves.

  I’m being pulled - out of myself, out of the flat and into the vast lake that used to be Leeds. The water closes round me - a cushioned surface of silver and bubbles. It is a satin dress, heavy, shining, sliding round my limbs, billowing up round my face, pulling me under. And I realise that I am smiling – a weird half-smile. I can feel it tug my lips as if I am somewhere else. I must look like some weirdo Mona Lisa. The thought wrenches me, threatens to pull me gasping, spluttering from the lake. But I am stone and calm again. Sinking, super-dense now and accelerating down. Super-gravity, and yet floating. Time is distorting, like at the edge of a black hole. I spin in slow-mo, the curving side of a vortex. Cool, calm, all sounds muffled, the water blurring and blurring my stone eyes. And all around the ripples ring out and out and out and out and out……

  But she’s worried. I’m lying too still. A hand - gentle - on some part of me. The catch in her low voice. You are…alive still?

  And I have to speak. Such an effort - to form words with my stone mouth, to open it under all this lake, to be heard in this deep stillness.

  But I reassure her, and then - wonder of wonders - am able to stay deep, still, calm, feeling the O ringing and ringing – me, the room, the world.

  And she lets me – no selfish stroking, no biting my unprotected neck, no shuffling or suggesting another flute of sekt. She lies behind me – long, smooth and still.

  I suck in a breath – smelling her sweet sheets. Wonder how long I had forgotten to breathe. Gradually, gradually
, I savour this astonishing dimension, slowing right down, stretching out and out…allowing myself to have this.

  And that’s the revelation. This tender gentleness. This new me. This relaxed and relaxing quality of touch that I have discovered in myself – it allows orgasms in. I didn’t even tense up in the throes – didn’t have the throes. Making love no longer a fight with myself – with her. Life – no longer quite such a fight.

  Father and Sons

  James Nash

  I was on my knees looking into a dusty case full of chipped glasses and decanters when I saw them. Two oriental figures of boys, perhaps carved out of a dark wood, were sitting, small and round, at the front of a shelf. I picked up the larger of the two. Just as I did so, random sunlight from an upper window struck through him and stained the tips of my fingers pink. The figure, his arms full of a huge carp, was actually carved from a translucent, morello cherry-coloured resin. Red amber from ancient Chinese pine forests. Another hand reached past me into the case picking up the smaller boy.

  It made me jump. I got up and turned stiffly. In the half-light of the shop I saw that a young man was already holding his boy high up to the light of the window, as if inviting the sunshine through. And the Chinese figure, holding a small dragon closely to his chest, glowed from within like a ruby, his face a blush of happiness. The young man looked delightedly at the rose colour on his skin, and said, ‘Look at that.’

  He could have been talking to himself, but then he smiled over at me.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  I smiled back tentatively, as he lowered the figure, weighing it in his hand like a cricket ball. I could barely make out his features in the gloom, just the white of his teeth, the arch of eyebrows, as I tested the weight of the little boy in my hand. He was not heavy.

  And then I held my Chinese boy above my head too, up to the sharp wintry sun glancing through the high window. Motes of dust hung in the air, slowly turning light streamed around him and through him. And I discovered that, apparently smooth-skinned and perfect on the outside, he was, when fully lit, a maze of internal cracks and fissures. The light glinted and was diverted by each fracture, so that it sprang from his knee and his shoulder; and the inside of his head seemed to contain a cobweb of fault lines, of blood vessels. He had perhaps been dropped, or thrown. One, or several, careless owners. Or it may have been the way the amber had formed itself. But it seemed to me that his eyes twinkled. And his face wore the same good-humoured expression as his brother’s.

  ‘Aren’t they great?’ he said, proffering the figure in his hand. I smiled assent but still did not speak. I was bothered by him, by his friendliness, his wanting to engage. But more than that: a familiarity about him. His shape in the half-light of the stall. The way he stood.

  I reached out and took it, still warm, from him, and put the brothers together on top of the case. I had once collected small pieces like these, and had long since lost interest, but these two brought out unexpected parental feelings in me. They needed a home. Although priced separately, they belonged together. And I knew that, if I left them in the shop, thoughts of them would be buzzing in my head for days. And that if I went back later in the week they might be gone. Holding them both in one hand, I moved over to the counter in the window, where a young woman was reading a paperback copy of Oliver Twist.

  The young man, just behind me, said, ‘Are you going to buy them?’

  ‘Yes. Love at first sight I’m afraid. They were originally wedding gifts, and are supposed to bring good luck, longevity and fertility. So cheap at the price.’

  The shop assistant looked up briefly at this, saw nothing beyond two men chatting, very quickly lost interest and returned to her book.

  I looked at him. And in the better light saw him properly for the first time. A shock of recognition, of painful delight, before the chilly realisation ultimately that this was not, and could not be, Simon. Because Simon was dead. Perhaps I looked at him a second or two longer than was usual. But he was not disconcerted, he simply smiled, as if it was his due, and extended one hand. His left one. The other he was using to lean against the counter.

  ‘Hi, I’m Brendan.’

  And I realised that his voice was quite different from Simon’s, deeper, with a north east inflection. Our hands met and clasped in a handshake. There was no tingle of recognition in the physical meeting. Simon was dead.

  We both spoke at the same time.

  ‘I’m a bit short of cash at the moment, otherwise I would have grabbed them from you,’ he paused before continuing, ‘I’ve just started a new job.’

  ‘This will be the first thing I’ve bought for myself for a long time.’

  I handed the two figures over to the assistant, trying not to stare at Brendan. But when I looked at him an involuntary smile broke out on my face. He had wandered off and was looking at a collection of tankards. A bit broader in the shoulder. Hair less ginger and more conker-coloured. A similar walk but not the same. I paid for the Chinese figures and had them wrapped, and we walked out of Waterloo Antiques together, onto the little cobbled street at the back of the Corn Exchange.

  Now I had a carrier bag in addition to my briefcase. Brendan looked at me, with a kind of hunger. I searched his face for more of Simon. It seemed we both did not want to break the connection we had made. Whatever it was.

  ‘What are you up to now?’ he said roughly. Perhaps embarrassment.

  ‘Off to pick up my car. I’ve parked it down by the brewery.’

  ‘I’ll walk a little way with you, if I may.’

  I couldn’t think of a way of dissuading him. And wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to.

  Brendan chatted, and I listened, as we threaded our way under a railway bridge and into the waterfront area. He was twenty-three and had finished university eighteen months before. He was from Middlesbrough. He had recently broken up with his girlfriend. He had never known his mother, been brought up by his dad, and then, at seven when his father had died, had been fostered or been in care throughout the rest of his childhood.

  We found ourselves standing on the narrow footbridge over the river to the Tetley’s brewery. All around us were the beginnings of new buildings, of a new Leeds. Cranes hung against the now clouded white sky, like crossed swords on an heraldic device. I told him about myself. A surprising amount. His eyes seemed fixed on the river below, but every now and again I felt his gaze on my profile like a warm breath. I was in my mid-forties. Fresh out of a marriage. Senior Social Worker. Fucked up. A father.

  ‘All the ‘fs’ then,’ was his response to this.

  I smiled and continued. Two sons. The elder, Simon, had died in a car accident two years before. But I didn’t say how much I missed him every single day. How much he would have liked the Chinese figures too. Liked them, as I did, for the way they looked and what they represented. One perfect and the other so mysteriously damaged. Or how much Brendan looked like him, and how fascinating and painful that was. Like picking at a scab obsessively, a day or so too early, and finding you’ve made yourself bleed. Instead I talked about Oliver who was twelve and lived with his mother. My comic, and strong-minded, youngest son. And curiously it was the first time I had been able to talk about either of the boys without something catching in my voice. Finally I felt I had to justify talking about Simon, and a flash of something brief but unrecognisable passed over Brendan’s face when I said, ‘Of course the strange thing is that although Simon’s dead, I always have to mention him. The fact that I had two sons. Anything else would be betrayal.’

  ‘How old was he, your son?’ he asked.

  ‘He was about to be twenty-one,’ I answered, looking into the dark and still water below, ‘Driving home from university in my wife’s car, he just went off the road. The doctors said it could have been a stroke. Our marriage didn’t last long after that.’

  I felt again the shame I always had when I talked about my marriage break-up. The sense of public failure.

  There was a pause, an
d I could see him assimilating this information, his brows knotted. He was not handsome, just had the pleasant looks of youth. But there was a charm beyond the ordinary in the movement of his face. His willingness to engage. His intelligence. I felt myself very drawn to him, but unwillingly. It felt disloyal to Simon. Close to treachery. And Simon, I had to remind myself, had been intensely shy; he would never have struck up a conversation with a stranger, and indeed would never have been able to meet a stranger’s eye.

  Steam from the brewery bubbled into the sky behind his head as he said, ‘Just the same age as me then.’

  I looked at Brendan. He had winded me. And it was as if I was gasping for breath. Surely he knew the effect his words would have? His expression was fascinated, like a scientist who, having discovered a process to measure pain, was trying it out. I turned away from him to look back at the Parish Church. And over to the right at The Royal Armouries like a huge grain silo. The pause pooled into a longer silence.

  ‘Are things any better now?’ he finally asked, screwing up his eyes against the sun.

  I filled my lungs with air. Regarded him warily. And I talked about my good relationship with my younger son. A nice place to live in Chapel Allerton. A job I enjoyed. In the last few months a girlfriend. A close circle of friends. At the mention of friends, Brendan’s brown eyes almost disappeared as he screwed them up in apparent discomfort. He said in a rush, as if embarrassed, ‘When I finished university I decided that I didn’t want to keep the friends I had made then, so I just stopped seeing them. It felt great making a new start. They were beginning to hold me back.’