by Ian McDonald
Sitting in Thomas Lull’s over-air-conditioned office, Lisa Durnau could still catch the emotional afterglow of that outburst, like the microwave echo of the fires of the big bang. Thomas Lull swivelled his chair, leaned toward her.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Well, two things you should about this place. It’s got a fucking awful climate, but the people are mighty friendly. Be polite to them. You may need them.’
For Thomas Lull’s amusement today, Dr Darius Ghotse has a set of recordings of the English comedy classic ‘It’s That Man Again’ in the boot of the tricycle that he labours along the sand tracks of Thekaddy. He is anticipating slipping the file into Professor Lull’s machine and the plummy voice blaring out the signature tune. ‘One hundred and five years old!’ he will say. ‘When the bombs were falling on London, this was what they were listening to in their underground railway tunnels!’
Dr Ghotse collects antique radio programmes. Most days he calls around for breakfast with Thomas Lull on his boat and they sit under the palm-thatch awning to sip chai and listen to the alien humour of the Goons or the hyper-real comedy of Chris Morris’s Blue Jam. Dr Ghotse has a particular fondness for BBC Radio. He is a widower and former paediatrician but in his heart of hearts, he is an Englishman. He wishes Thomas Lull could understand cricket. He could then share his classic Aggers and Johnners Test commentaries with him.
He rattles down the rutted lane that runs beside the backwater, kicking at chickens and insolent dogs. Without braking, he swerves the aged red trike off the track, up the gangplank and on to a long, mat-roofed kettuvallam. It is a manoeuvre he has performed many times. It has never yet ended him in the water.
Thomas Lull has Tantric symbols painted on his coconut thatch and a name on the hull in white: Salve Vagina. They offend local Christians mightily. The priest has informed him thus. Thomas Lull counter-informed him that he (priest) could criticise him (Lull) when he could do so in as good Latin as his boat title. A small high-power satellite dish is gaffer-taped to the highest point of the sloped roof-mats. An alcohol generator purrs in the stern.
‘Professor Lull, Professor Lull.’ Dr Ghotse ducks under the low eave, fileplayer held high. As usual, the houseboat smells of incense, alcohol and stale cooking. The Schubert quintet plays, mid-volume. ‘Professor Lull?’
Dr Ghotse finds Thomas Lull in his small, neat bedroom that is like a wooden shell. His shirts and shorts and socks are laid out on pristine cotton. He folds his T-shirts the proper way, sides to the middle, then triple-crease. A lifetime spent among suitcases has made this second nature.
‘What has happened?’ Dr Ghotse asks.
‘Time to move on,’ Thomas Lull says.
‘A woman, then?’ Dr Ghotse asks. Thomas Lull’s appetite for, and success with, the girlis from the beach circuit has always baffled him. Men should be self-contained in later life, without attachments.
‘You could say. I met her last night at the club. She had an asthma attack. I saved her. There’s always someone frying their coronary arties on salbutamol. I offered to teach her some Buteyko tricks and she turned round and said, I will see you tomorrow, Professor Lull. She knew my name, Darius. Time to go.’
When Dr Ghotse met Thomas Lull, Lull had been working in an old record shop, a beach bum among the ancient compact discs and vinyls. Dr Ghotse had been a recently bereaved pensioner, chipping away at his grief laugh by antique laugh. He found a kindred soul in this sardonic American. Afternoons passed in conversation, recordings shared. But it was still three months before Dr Ghotse invited the man from the record shop for afternoon tea. Five visits later, when the afternoon tea turned into evening gin watching the astonishing sunsets behind the palms, Thomas Lull confided his true identity. At first Dr Ghotse felt sullied, that the man at the record shop he had got to know was an effigy of lies. Then he felt burdened: he did not wish to be the receptor of this man’s loss and rage. Then he felt privileged; owner of a world-class secret that could have netted him a fortune from the news channels. He had been entrusted. In the end, he realised that he had approached Thomas Lull with the same agenda, for someone to entrust and listen.
Dr Ghotse slips the file player into his jacket pocket. No ITMA today. Or any other day, it seems. Thomas Lull picks up the hardback copy of Blake that has sat beside every bed he has ever made home. He weighs it in his hands, then puts it into the case.
‘Come on, I’ve coffee on the go.’
The rear of the boat opens in an impromptu veranda, sheltered by the ubiquitous coir matting. Dr Ghotse lets Thomas Lull pour two coffees, which he does not much like, and follows him out to the two accustomed seats. Swimming kids splash in water two degrees lighter and cooler than the coffee.
‘So,’ Dr Ghotse says. ‘Where you will go?’
‘South,’ Thomas Lull says. Until he said it he hadn’t an idea of a destination. From the day he had moored the old rice-kettuvallam to the backwater shore, Thomas Lull has made it clear he was only here until the wind blew him on. The wind blew, the palms beat, the clouds passed and dropped no rain and Thomas Lull remained. He had come to love the boat, the sense of beachcombing rootlessness that would never have to prove itself. But she knew his name. ‘Lanka, maybe.’
‘Island of demons,’ Dr Ghotse says.
‘Island of beach bars,’ Thomas Lull says. Schubert reaches his allotted end. The waterkids dive and splash, drops clinging to their dark grinning faces. But the idea is in his head now and will not leave. ‘Maybe even get a boat over to Malaysia or Indonesia. There’re islands there no one will ever know your face. I could open a nice little dive school. Yeah. I could do that. Hell, I don’t know.’
He turns. Dr Ghotse feels it too. Living on water makes you as sensitive to vibrations as a shark. Salve Vagina rocks subtly to a tread on the gangplank. Someone has come aboard. The kettuvallam shifts as a body moves through it.
‘Hello? It is very dark in here.’ Aj ducks out from under the coir awning on to the rear deck. She is dressed the same loose, flowing grey of the night before. Her tilak is even more prominent in the daylight. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Ghotse is with you, I can come back later . . .’
Say it, Thomas Lull thinks. Her gods have given you this one chance, send her away and disappear and never look back. But she knew his name without meeting him, and she knows Dr Ghotse’s name and Thomas Lull has never been able to walk away from a mystery.
‘No no, you stay, there’s coffee.’
She is one of those people whose smile transforms their entire face. She claps her hands in small delight.
‘I’d love to, thank you.’
He’s lost now.
The hour clicks over to thirty and Lisa Durnau bubbles up from deep memory. Space, she decides, is the dimension of the stoned.
‘Hey,’ she croaks. ‘Any chance of some water?’ Her muscles are beginning to twist and wither.
‘Tube to your right,’ Pilot Captain Beth says without looking up from her board. Lisa cranes round to suck warm, stale distilled water. The woman pilot’s men friends back on the station are chattering and flirting. They’re never done talking and flirting. Lisa wonders if they ever get round to anything, or are they so frail and attenuated that anything approaching a fuck would snap them in two? New memory steals up on Lisa.
She was back in Oxford again, running. It was a city she loved to run in. Oxford was generous with paths and green spaces and the students had a culture of physical activity. It was an old route from her Keble time, along the canal path, through the meadows of Christ Church, up Bear Lane on to the High and then dodge pedestrians to the gate of All Souls and through on to Parks Road. It was good, physically secure, familiar to the foot. Today she turned right past the back of Merton through the Botanic gardens to Magdalen where the conference was being held. Oxford wore summer well. Groups of students were encamped on the grass. The flat thump and yell of soccer carried over the field, a sound she missed at KU. She missed the light also, that peculiar English gold of early evening with its
promise of seductive night. Set in her evening were a shower, a quick squint at the completely unsuspected mass extinction in Alterre’s marine biosphere and dinner at High Table, a formal thing of frocks and jackets to conclude the conference. Much better to be out in the streets and people places with the gold light moth-soft against bare skin.
Lull was waiting in her room.
‘See you, L. Durnau,’ he said. ‘See you in those ridiculous, clingy little lycra shorts and that tiny tiny top and your bottle of water in your hand.’ He stepped towards her. She was glossy and stinking with woman sweat. ‘I am going to take those ridiculous little shorts right off of you.’
He seized two fistfuls of elastic waistband and jerked down shorts and panties. Lisa Durnau gave a small cry. In one motion she peeled off her running top, kicked off her shoes and jumped him, legs around waist. Locked together, they reeled back into the shower. While he struggled with his clothing and cursed his clinging socks, she showered down. He barged in, pinned her against the tiled wall. Lisa swivelled her hips, wrapped her legs around him again, trying to find his cock with her vulva. Lull took a step back, pushed her gently away. Lisa Durnau flipped back into a handstand, locked her legs around his torso. Thomas Lull bent down, went in with the tongue. Half drowned, half ecstatic, Lisa wanted to scream but fought it. More enjoyable to fight it, half asphyxiated, inverted, drowning. Then she pinned Lull again with her thighs and he took her dripping and wrapped round him, threw her on to her bed and fucked her with the quad bells ringing curfew.
At High Table she sat next to a Danish postgrad, starry eyed at actually talking to an originator of the Alterre project. At the centre of the table Thomas Lull debated the social Darwinism of geneline therapy with the Master. Other than glancing up at his words, ‘kill the Brahmins now, while there aren’t that many of them’, Lisa did not acknowledge him. Those were the rules. It was a thing of conferences. It had begun at one, it found its fullest expression at them. When it came to its allotted end, the rules and terms of disengagement would be drawn up between conference items. Until then, the sex was glorious.
Lisa Durnau had always thought of sex as something that was all right for other people but was never part of her life-script. It wasn’t that fantastic. She could live pretty happily without it. Then, with the most unexpected of people, in the most inconvenient relationship, she discovered a sexuality where she could bring her own natural athleticism. Here was a partner who liked her sweaty and salt-flavoured in her beloved running gear, who liked it al fresco and al dente and seasoned with the things she had locked up in her libido for almost twenty years. Pastor Durnau’s sporty daughter didn’t do things like play-rape and Tantra. At the time her confidante was her sister Claire in Santa Barbara. They spent evenings on the phone going into all the dirty details, whooping with laughter. A married man. And her boss. Claire’s theory was because the relationship was so illicit, so secret, Lisa could unfold her own fantasy.
It had begun in Paris in the departure lounge at Charles de Gaulle Terminal 4. The flight to O’Hare was delayed. A fault in Brussels air traffic control had backed up planes as far out as the East Coast. BAA142 was on the board with a four hour delay. Lisa and Lull had come off an intellectually gruelling week defending the Lullite argument that real and virtual were meaningless chauvinisms against heavy attack from a cadre of French neo-realists. By now Lisa Durnau just wanted to climb her porch steps and check if Mr Cheknavorian next door had watered the herbs. The board clicked over to six hours delay. Lisa groaned. She had done the e-mail. She had updated her finances. She had looked in on Alterre, going through a quiescent phase between bursts of punctuated evolution. It was three o’clock in the morning and in the boredom and the tiredness and the dislocation of the limbo of the brightly lit lounge between nations, Lisa Durnau leaned her head against Thomas Lull’s shoulder. She felt his body move against hers and she was kissing him. Next thing they were sneaking into the airport showers with the attendant handing them two towels and whispering vive le sport.
She liked to be round Thomas Lull. He was fun, he could talk, he had a sense of humour. They had things in common; values, beliefs. Movies, books. Food; the legendary Mexican Friday lunches. All that was a long way from fucking doggie style on the wet tiles of a Terminal 4 shower cubicle, but in a sense not so far. Where else does love start but next door? You fancy what you see every day. The boy across the fence. The water-cooler colleague. The opposite sex friend you’ve always been especially close to. She knew she had always felt something for Thomas Lull; she had just never been able to give it a name or an action until exhaustion and frustration and dislocation took her out of her Lisa Durnau-ness.
He’d had them before. She knew all the names and many of the faces. He’d told her about them when the others went back to their partners and families and it was just the two of them with the jug of margarita and the oil lamps burning down. Never student flings, his wife was too well known on campus. Usually one nighters on the conference circuit, once an e-mail affair with a woman writer from Sausalito. And now she was a notch on the bedpost. Where it would end she could not say. But they still kept the thing about the showers.
After the dinner and the drinks reception they extricated themselves from the knot of conversation and headed over the Cherwell bridges to the cheaper end of town. Here were student bars that had not succumbed to corporatisation. One pint turned into two, then three because they had six guest real ales.
Halfway down the fourth he stopped said, ‘L. Durnau.’ She loved his name for her. ‘If anything should happen to me, I don’t know what, whatever happens when people say, “should something happen”: would you look after Alterre?’
‘Jesus, Lull.’ Her name for him. Lull and L. Durnau. Too many Ls and Us. ‘Are you expecting something? You haven’t got . . . anything?’
‘No no no. Just, looking ahead, you never know. I could trust you to look after it right. Stop them sticking fucking Coke banners on the clouds.’
They never made it through the rest of the guest ales. As they walked back to the halls through the warm, noisy night, Lisa Durnau said, ‘I will, yes. If you can swing the faculty, I will look after Alterre.’
Two days later they came in to Kansas City on the last flight of the night and the staff closed up the airport behind them. It was only jet lag that kept Lisa Durnau awake on the drive to the university. She dropped Thomas Lull at his sprawling green place out in the burbs.
‘See ya,’ she whispered. She knew better than to expect a kiss even at three in the morning. By the time she got up her steps and through her screen door and dumped her bag in the hall the accumulated body-shock rolled over her like a semi. She aimed herself for the big bed. Her palmer called. She thought about not answering it. Lull.
‘Could you come over? Something’s happened.’
She had never, ever heard his voice sound like that before. Terrified, she drove through the greying pre-dawn. At every intersection her imagination cranked up a new level of dreads and possibilities but back of them all was the master fear; they had been found out. The lights were all on and the doors stood open.
‘Hello the house?’
‘In here.’
He sat on the old rollback leather sofa she knew from faculty barbecues and Sunday sports days. It and two tall bookcases were the only pieces of furniture in the room. The rest had been stripped. The floor was bare, the walls carried picture-hooks like hanging Spanish question marks.
‘Even the cats,’ Thomas Lull said. ‘Right down to the toy mice. Can you believe it? Toy mice. You should see the den. She took her time over that one. She went through every single book and disk and file. I suppose it’s not so much losing a wife as getting rid of a collection of Italian opera favourites.’
‘Had you?’
‘Any idea? No. I walked in and all was as you see it. There was this.’ He held up a piece of paper. ‘The usual stuff, hadn’t been working, sorry, but it was the only way. Don’t try to get in touch
. You know, she has the gumption to get up and lift everything without a word of warning, but when it comes to the fond farewell, she comes out with every fucking cliche in the book. That is so her. That is so her.’
He was shaking now.
‘Thomas. Come on, you can’t stay here. Come on back to mine.’
He looked puzzled then nodded.
‘Yes, thank you, yes.’
Lisa picked up his bag as she steered him to her car. He suddenly seemed very old and uncertain. At her house she made him hot tea which he drank while she made up the spare bed, out of sensitivity.
‘Would you mind?’ Thomas Lull asked. ‘Could I come in with you? I don’t want to be on my own.’
He lay with his back to Lisa Durnau, folded in on himself. Photo-sharp images of the desecrated room and Lull tiny as a boy on his big man’s sofa startled Lisa awake each time she approached the drop into sleep. In the end she did sleep, as the grey of pre-dawn filled up her big bedroom.