“Did you?”
“It was very pretty. It was wood, and it had a little painting on it, and so I stole it.”
“Yes?”
“And I never did use it because I felt too much shame about myself.”
“You gave it back, I suppose?”
I thought I’d tease him a bit and so I looked at him as if he were mad, and said, “No, of course not. I’ve still got it. I’ll show you one day.”
“And you’ve still never used it?”
I shook my head, and blew out smoke. I thought, “I wonder what he’ll make of that,” but he didn’t say anything. Chris often didn’t comment about what I said, because he was worried about making the right impression.
“I like you,” I said, “because you listen. I tell you anything, but you don’t get shocked, you just listen.”
“I do get shocked,” he admitted, “a bit.”
“Oh, it’s being polite, is it? You don’t let me see, about how shocked you are? In my country everyone says that the English are hypocrites, because they’re always pretending, but I think it’s because the manners are too good.”
“Well, it’s very interesting, listening to you. I don’t want you to stop, so I don’t look shocked, even if I am. These days I feel like an old man. Nobody’s interested in someone like me. Youngsters look at me and I know they’re thinking that I’m a retarded dinosaur with one foot in the grave. The thing about being me and being forty is that I feel I’ve got to offer something extra, because no one would be interested in me otherwise. Probably I’m just being stupid. The world’s gone beyond my opinions, if you know what I mean. I feel old-fashioned when I get shocked, and I don’t like it.”
“OK,” I said, “I’ll tell you something. When I got my first hair…down there…I didn’t realise it was mine, and I pulled at it, and I only realised it was mine when it hurt.”
He definitely was shocked. “Why did you tell me that?”
“Are you shocked?”
He reflected a moment, and denied it. “No, not really, I’ve got used to you trying to shock me. The most surprising thing was when you said something about sleeping with your father.”
“I’ll tell you more about that one day, if you like. Would you like it?” I leaned forward and smiled in a way that was suggestive. He looked a little angry. “I can’t help feeling that you’re playing games with me. You tease me. You know, sometimes, Roza, I wonder what’s going on. Sometimes I feel like the idiot in a spy book.”
I was alarmed. I didn’t want him to be angry and give me up. I didn’t know what to say. In the end I just got up and went and poured myself more coffee. When I came back I put my hand on his arm and said, “Sorry.” I could feel his pleasure at being touched by me, and he smiled up at me a little weakly, and said, “Oh, it’s nothing. Really, it’s me who’s sorry.”
I said, “Please don’t give up on me, I couldn’t bear it.”
“Why would I do that?”
“People do, sometimes.”
He looked at me and I was sure that he was in love with me. He said, “I don’t think I could ever give up on you.” I kissed him on the forehead, like a daughter. It’s nice to have someone you can be affectionate with, and you know they’re not dangerous. I was getting feelings too. I could sense them bubbling up. I kept wondering what it would be like if we were lovers, and whether I’d be jealous of his wife. I thought I probably wouldn’t. You don’t get jealous of the zookeeper who keeps the monkey in the cage. If I were going to be jealous of her, I would have started already.
“I was going to tell you about Miss Radic,” I said.
“Oh yes?”
“She was a great teacher. She told me all about women’s things, having periods and getting breasts and that kind of thing. If she hadn’t, I think I wouldn’t have known anything.”
“My teachers were all paedophiles, sadists, and megalomaniacs,” said Chris. “I had a wonderful education, though. I can count to a hundred in Latin. I had a teacher who’d been in Africa, and now there’s nothing I don’t know about Zulus. He started every geography and history lesson with ‘When I was out in Africa…’ ”
“Did anyone teach you about being a man, you know…men’s things?”
“Not really. When we left school the headmaster advised us that if anyone should try to interfere with us, we should kick him in the balls. If he’d told us that before, there would have been a couple of masters with aching groins. As for the facts of life, I learned most of the basics the moment I went to school, from the other boys.”
“Oh,” I said, “I didn’t have any pervert teachers. Miss Radic was nice. My mother wasn’t much good, though. When I had my period she just got worried about the sheets. Miss Radic patted me on the head and said congratulations. And she told me not to get a disengaged heart.”
“A disengaged heart? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s about sex and love,” I said. “She meant I should keep them together.”
“And did you?”
I felt some pain inside, and said honestly, “No, I didn’t keep them together. I never did anything right.” I laughed and shook my head. “I’ve been crap.” I stopped and lit another cigarette, and then I said, “When Miss Radic told me about the facts, I cried, and I said, ‘I don’t want to have one of those things put inside me and get pregnant.’ Miss Radic laughed and hugged me to her chest. She had her spectacles on a cord round her neck, and I felt them pressing into me, all hard and strange.”
Chris said, “It’s funny what memories we choose to keep.”
ELEVEN
The Betrayal
I was like a fifteen-year-old.
By this time I was beginning to have some problems. I was losing sleep because I just lay in my sheets sweating and itching and thinking about Roza, mentally taking her clothes off, and visualising all the things I wanted to do with her.
I was like a fifteen-year-old, getting one erection after another. Even if I crept downstairs to the living room and did something about it in the dark, I’d be back in bed for only half an hour before it happened all over again, and I’d have to go back down. It became painful, and I felt I was humiliating myself, but at the same time I was amazed and proud that I had such potency left at my age, after so many years of a dry marriage and its dismal abstinence. Sometimes it was so bad that I had to take three shots of whisky before I could get myself off to sleep.
The next time I called, the door was answered by the Bob Dylan Upstairs. He looked as if he’d been crying, and he was wearing a black armband on his left arm. He was wearing the huge pair of moccasins, much too big for him, and I don’t think I have ever seen anyone looking so despondent. I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
He said, “What for?” and I said, “Your bereavement, obviously.” I gestured towards the black armband.
“Oh,” he said, glancing down at it, “no one’s died. It’s Dylan.”
“Dylan?”
“Mmm, Dylan. He’s gone and cut a religious record.” His eyes filled with tears.
“Lots of people do religious records. I’m sure Cliff Richard must have done one, and my wife has several Christmas ones by people like Bing Crosby.”
He looked at me scornfully and said, “Shit, when Dylan does it, you know it’s the end. And Knopfler’s playing guitar on it. You’d think that Knopfler might have tried to stop him.”
I had no idea who this Knopfler was, and had to find out from my daughter when I got home. I said to the BDU, “Is the music no good then?”
“The music’s good, but I can’t take all that paranoid Christian stuff. It’s all hellfire and eternal punishment and the end of the world. Jesus, Dylan used to be intelligent. He used to write about idiots who thought they had God on their side. It wouldn’t be so bad, but there’s no one else remotely like him. I mean, when even Dylan turns off his brain, what hope is there for the rest of us?”
I was amused. He probably felt as my father had when he’d fi
nally realised that Oswald Mosley was a foolish peacock. I said, “You’ve lost your hero, I suppose.”
“I’ve lost my voice. No one’s speaking any more. I might as well go and work in a bank.”
I didn’t quite see what was so bad about working in a bank; at least he wouldn’t have had to live in a slum. But I realised that he would think less of me if I said so. Instead I said, “That would be terrible.” But I couldn’t help adding, “You make him sound like your ventriloquist.”
He smiled and said, “I’ll have to make up my own words now. I never thought I’d have to.”
I said, “Maybe you overestimate his importance.”
He shrugged, and I said, “My daughter’s always quoting Bob Dylan lines at me. One of her favourites is ‘Don’t follow leaders, watch your parking meters.’ ” The BDU looked at me in utter amazement, and I went in to see Roza feeling that I had just scored an unexpected triumph.
That morning Roza decided to tell me that when she was in her early teens she’d had a lesbian interlude. Her addiction to telling me stories never abated. As for me, I kept listening because I really was interested, and it was the one way that I could keep her enthusiastic about my coming back. It’s true that I loved to watch her and fantasise about her when she was talking.
By then I’d saved up another twenty pounds. I was keeping the money in a Manila envelope in my breast pocket, because I didn’t want to leave it anywhere in the house where my wife could find it. I wish now that I’d had the sense to put it in a deposit account, but I liked the feeling of being rich that having a wad of notes gives you. I had realised that saving was quite a good habit in its own right, and I was thinking that maybe when I’d reached the symbolic five hundred I should buy lots of premium bonds, and see if Ernie could make me rich.
TWELVE
Natalja
She was my ideal self.
It was such fun telling Chris my stories, even though I now wish I hadn’t told him some of them. I was flattered that an older man was treating me as if I was so interesting, and anyway, I was beginning to depend on him. I could tell he was falling for me, and I knew I was falling for him. He was married, but the wife seemed theoretical to me. I’d never met her and he hardly ever mentioned her, so she didn’t really exist. I started to have pretty dreams about Chris lifting me out of my life, and God knows, I could have done with being lifted out. I sometimes hoped that we could go away together and start a new life. Chris seemed to be a perfect gentleman. He was longing for me, but he never pushed himself. I used to observe the way that he looked at me when he didn’t know that I was observing him. He liked to look at my breasts and my groin, and I am sure that he often leaned forward to pay attention to me because he was trying to hide whatever was happening. I liked to think about that, and it made me sweat. I was having interesting dreams about him. One of them was about taking a vase of flowers to his room, and him sitting at a desk and turning and smiling at me. That’s all it was, a little dream about a simple act of love.
Anyway, my stories were the method I used to keep him coming back. Once I’d started, I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t have borne it if he’d lost interest. I don’t know how I would have coped with the loneliness.
I knew that a lot of men were turned on by lesbians, or the thought of what they got up to anyway, so I told him the Natalja story, about when I went to a Young Communist Pioneer camp in Dalmatia.
This is what I told him:
It was the usual embarrassing stuff: folkloric dancing, community singing, long hikes, stupid games, and lectures about the heroes of communism. Even so, I liked it because the climate was nicer there, and everything smelled of seafood and lemons, and there were two little islands, and a big mountain behind us. There was something about the air that made me feel happy, I suppose. I wasn’t just thinking about myself all the time, so I felt free.
One day, after we’d watched some slide shows, we went to a museum that was a Franciscan monastery, and it had the largest collection of seashells in the world. I was looking at a collection of cowries, when I smelled peaches and lavender, and I realised that it was the girl standing next to me. She said, “I hate shells. I’d rather look at all the French boys on the beach.”
“How do you know they’re French?” I asked.
“I don’t. It’s just that I’d like them to be. I’m Natalja, but everyone calls me Tasha. You’re Roza. I asked someone.” She said, “I think we’re going to be friends. I looked at everybody in the whole lousy camp, and you were the only one.”
I was flattered, and a bit surprised. I’d never been picked out like that before, and I didn’t know how to react. She didn’t seem to notice, and just carried on talking. “You and I are the prettiest in the camp, and I thought it would be a bad idea to be enemies. Do you like boys?”
“No,” I said. “Not yet, anyway.”
She took my arm and walked me to the next case of shells. “I don’t really, either. What I like is the idea of them. I wish I had your cheekbones. I haven’t got any tits yet, but I’m still hoping.”
Tasha was taller than me, and very slender. She had the longest hair I’ve ever seen. It was blonde and wavy and it fell to her waist. She had to brush it aside to stop it obscuring her vision. She had dark eyebrows, and her eyes were so brown that they seemed black, and yet whenever I think of her I have to remind myself that they weren’t blue.
She always wore blue, and she was usually barefoot. She liked to celebrate her willowy figure by striking melodramatic poses and declaiming lines from plays, and she could do all sorts of amazing acrobatic feats that I wouldn’t have dared to try. She did cartwheels next to me when we walked, and when she did a backflip you didn’t even hear her land. She was a sort of nature spirit. She once put her hands on the floor and got both feet right behind her neck. She looked at me gravely, and said, “Do you think this position will be helpful to me when I’m married?”
I loved Tasha because she was everything that I would have liked to have been. She was my ideal self, uninhibited, blunt, light-hearted, funny and exuberant, the sort of girl who slept unashamedly through all the slide shows and talks about communism, and scrawled her name on the monument to the Yugoslav Navy when no one was looking. She didn’t want to help building a wall because she said that God had made men stupid and strong so that women didn’t have to do those kinds of things. She sang out of tune and didn’t care.
Tasha and I walked around the backstreets arm in arm, sucking on ice creams while she pointed out the best male backsides. They were all French, of course. We ate bowlfuls of aubergine ratatouille, dripping with olive oil, and aromatic with oregano, garlic and black pepper. Once she got up on a wall and tried to teach me how to belch at will. She lay along it like a model on a photographic shoot, rotating her hand from the wrist, with the forefinger extended, conducting her own little concert of ladylike belches. It was a way of enjoying the ratatouille all over again, she said. I was so embarrassed that I went as far away as I could without actually leaving.
She persuaded two German boys to take us to a disco, and then refused to dance with either of them. Lots of men bought us drinks, but we danced with each other, and came out at midnight with our brains reeling from the heavy bass and the flashing lights. She kissed me underneath a plane tree, and I felt my heart lurch. There was a moment when I saw the glow in her eyes, and felt her hot breath on my face, and her arms were trembling.
Tasha was a Slovene, but she lived in Belgrade because her father was a representative in the federal parliament. It was possible to continue our friendship after the camp because it was quite easy for me to get to Francuska Street. We talked on the phone so much that it irked our parents, and she often came out to stay with me in the country. My father loved her so much that it made me jealous.
Tasha was enchanting. She had a head full of dreams and fantasies that permitted her to be carried away by conquering heroes or to die of consumption in a nunnery. At one minute she was a princess, an
d then she was a Gypsy from Herzogovina, and then she was an Amazonian warrior, a millionairess, an actress.
I know what it was I loved in her, but I don’t know what she saw in me. I was dark and stocky, a little sad and unsure, and she was the opposite. I couldn’t have filled her life as she filled mine. That’s the odd thing about affection, though. If you have a large amount of it to bestow, and if the right person isn’t there to receive it, you bestow it on someone else until a better candidate comes along. We wrote each other letters that ended “Your loving friend forever” or “Eternally yours,” which I kept in a large brown envelope that I left under my pillow.
During our holidays we liked to go with a basket of fruit and cheese to our place by the river. There was a large shallow pool enclosed by birch trees, and sometimes you could see trout waving their tails in the current.
The first time we went there it was high summer, and Tasha wiggled her toes in the water, and found it deliciously cold. She dared me to dare her to go in, and in a trice she’d stripped and waded in. She was squealing and laughing because of the cold, and I was full of fear and admiration. She made me long for a freedom to which I wasn’t psychologically suited. “Come on in,” she called, and I shook my head. “But it’s lovely,” she said, and I was torn between my shame and my anxiety not to appear ashamed. I stripped off and waded into the water with my arms over my breasts, which were quite heavy even in those days.
I wish I could describe her body without feeling embarrassed about it. I still have the picture in my head very clearly, but you’ll have to imagine it. If you were to ask me straight questions I could probably give a straight answer, though.
After bathing we’d sun ourselves on the rug until we got too hot and had to go back into the water until we got too cold again. On the rug we’d lie side by side and talk, and get startled and panicky every time that we thought we heard somebody coming.
She once explained to me why she behaved as irrepressibly as she did. She said, “I was born to be young. In fact I was born to be exactly the age that I am now, and that’s why I want to make the most of it, because I know it can’t last. One day I am going to have to make grown-up decisions, and be sensible. I’m going to have to find work and a flat to live in, I’m going to have to count the coins and pay the bills. One day I’ll see wrinkles appearing around my eyes, and my breasts will start to sag, if they ever get to grow big in the first place, and sometime I’ll have to find a promising man to marry, and the man will want me to iron his shirts, and then the part of me that tells me to be crazy will die so slowly that I mostly won’t notice it happening, and then one day I’ll look in the mirror and see my mother looking back at me, and then these times with you will seem like a beautiful dream that happened to someone else.”
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