Genie and Paul

by Natasha Soobramanien

  She was on her way to Roxy’s, she said. Eloise had taken Genie there on that first trip into town. She had bought Genie a fudge sundae and sat smoking menthol cigarettes while Genie tucked in, not daring to look further than her engorged spoon, afraid of the boys slapping and thumping the games machines around them: rough white boys with gelled hair and raw skin who were suddenly leaning towards them, staring at Eloise while she blew smoke-rings and stared back with narrowed eyes.

  Now Eloise was looking at Paul that same way. And he in turn looked almost hostile, Genie thought, just like one of those sneering white boys.

  See you around, said Eloise, sneering back.

  The next day was Sunday. Genie and Eloise had skipped mass. They were alone on Castle Hill and walked around the ruins of Hastings Castle, arm in arm. The sky seemed burdened with cloud. Eloise said, You get witches here, you know.

  Genie thought about the part of town they had walked through to get there. Where the shops gave up all pretence of being commercial outfits and resigned themselves to what they really were – the front rooms of slumped houses. In the windows old radios and hoovers, hamster-wheels, dusty cakes, collections of old medals from forgotten wars, displays of Fifties-style satin dresses, some faintly stained, hanging stiffly. It was easy to imagine the place full of witches but they were Mrs Cantrips: dowdy, ageing, fusty-smelling spinster witches with worn-out powers and moulting broomsticks.

  You’re wrong, said Eloise. There’s powerful magic here. Black magic. Hastings is built on ley lines.

  Genie knew about those. Paul had explained them to her. She told Eloise about his theory, that tube lines corresponded with other kinds of lines: blood lines, ley lines. All kinds of power lines. And Eloise asked, How come you two are different colours?

  Different dads.

  They clambered onto the ruins and stood looking down at the town, which lay caught in a cracked shell of cloud below. The fishing boats on the beach looked like tiny Chinese slippers and all the town’s movement was stilled at their great height. Even the waves out at sea seemed to break in slow motion.

  Why do people say they’re scared of heights when what they really mean is that they’re scared of falling? Genie asked.

  They were balanced on the broken wedge of wall, clutching each other, poised just so – so that if one of them moved, she would fall, and if she fell, the other would fall with her.

  They’re not afraid of falling, said Eloise. They’re afraid of landing. If you carried on falling, it would be OK.

  Then, almost to herself, Eloise said, The colour of honey.

  By summer they were inseparable. And when Genie was in the infirmary with glandular fever Eloise was in the bed right beside her, recovering from a spell of fainting fits. Sometimes Eloise would undress in front of Genie, daring her to stare. Eloise was so pale she looked as though she had milk for blood. But it was her bra that made Genie sad. Genie did not possess one herself yet but the bras she had seen in the laundry pile were teen bras, pretty things. This was an old woman’s bra, stiff with rough lace and heavy-looking, the colour of an Elastoplast bandage. Eloise looked so frail, it seemed to Genie that the bra was holding her up.

  In the long, liquid evenings they would hang out of the infirmary window, looking down on the other girls in the gardens, feeling the warm air on their faces. It was hard to sleep at night, in the high soft beds. They decided that they would spend as much of the holidays as they could together.

  You could come to my house, said Eloise. You could meet Bel Gazou.

  Could I? asked Genie, delighted.

  Yes, said Eloise. And you could bring Paul.

  During the holidays Genie received a card, a scratchy drawing of a woman with long red hair scraped back from a bony face. She was sitting with one knee drawn up to her chin, staring sullenly with bulging eyes. She looked half-starved.

  That’s from Eloise, isn’t it? Paul said. She thinks it looks like her. That’s why she sent it.

  Her mum’s going away. She’s asked me to come and stay.

  Watch it. She’s trouble.

  But he did not say anything to Mam.

  Genie could not believe Eloise lived in such luxury – in a whole house, one of those huge white ones with pillars, like a wedding cake. Eloise showed her around in a desultory fashion, kicking at the antique furniture, inviting Genie to trail a hand through the rack of evening dresses in Mrs Hayne’s walk-in wardrobe – beaded, sequinned, or of slippery satin – Eloise sneering at it all. Genie kept quiet, trying to remember everything so she could tell Paul afterwards. Bel Gazou could not be coaxed out of the wardrobe, where she lay cowering for most of Genie’s visit – in the fur section, to Genie’s quiet horror and Eloise’s amusement.

  Genie was shown the collection of drinks in Mrs Hayne’s cocktail cabinet – the spirits which were clear as water until Eloise swilled the bottle and you saw the thick oiliness of the liquid; the shapely bottles of sticky liqueurs which, held to the light, entranced Genie with their jewelled colours. They picked off the sugary crusts that had formed on the open mouth of the bottles and sucked on them.

  Taste this one, Eloise commanded, sticking out her finger. On its tip was something crystallised.

  Looks like bogies.

  Taste it.

  With the tip of her tongue she dabbed the tip of Eloise’s finger. It was bitter, it was sweet.

  Guess which bottle that came from?

  When she guessed correctly she was rewarded with a swig – Campari. It looked as though it should have tasted of raspberries but instead it tasted like medicine. Genie passed the bottle back to Eloise, who glugged from it and passed it back to her.

  Don’t worry, shrugged Eloise as Genie realised with a rush of panic that the bottle was now empty, I’ll just tell my mum that she drank it all. She always believes me.

  Then she said, Let’s ring Paul.

  He had been planning to meet up with his friend Sol that night, he told Genie. But he cancelled his plans when he heard the slurring in her voice.

  What kind of mess has Schiele Girl got you into? he said, when he arrived an hour later. He told Genie he would tell her off the next morning, when she was hungover, so it would hurt more; she wouldn’t remember anything he said to her in this state anyway. Then he helped her to the bathroom and held back her hair while she was sick. The vomit was cherry-coloured. When Genie asked, in between retches, where Eloise was, Paul looked annoyed. Your friend, he said, has left me to clean up her mess while she dances about in the living room. The Stone Roses, though, he said more gently, so we’ll let her off. He stroked Genie’s hair and wiped her face with a damp flannel that smelt of lemons.

  Then he carried her up to bed.

  She could tell by the light when she woke that it was early in the afternoon. She was alone in Eloise’s room. Out in the hallway, she saw a bloody lump on the thick pale carpet. It looked like a half-chewed jelly baby. She picked it up and held it to the light. It was a tiny foetus which lay curled like a blue prawn in its sac. It was Bel Gazou’s. A miscarried kitten. Genie followed the thick strings of blood which trailed to the master bedroom. She pushed open the door and that was when she saw them: Eloise, with her hair spread over the pillow, her old lady’s lacy bra unclasped, her small breasts and large, rosy nipples exposed, and Paul, lying over her, nothing on but the chain around his neck, the medal now hovering in Eloise’s face, as though he was trying to hypnotise her.

  (ix) The Meeting

  Genie opened her eyes, stunned, as the sun kicked sand in them. She felt as she had done ten days ago on regaining consciousness: that same not knowing for a few seconds where she was, or who she was; and if she felt anything at all it was a sense of being scattered, of waking up after an explosion, bits of her blown up all over the place with her limbs all tangled up – tangled up in someone else’s limbs, whoever he was, this boy in the bed beside her. His bed. His flat. Where was she? He was still asleep, his face mashed into the pillow as though he’d fallen
from a great height, his arm fixed across her like a crook-lock.

  Gradually, she remembered. These last few nights she had spent trawling Paul’s old haunts, looking for him, all the while knowing somehow that her search was futile. Hadn’t Eloise given him money? Would Paul really stay in London? Their London? Genie knew that her search for Paul was not so much born of a belief that she might find him as it was a substitute for that belief.

  Her days were spent hungover, going back to the places she’d been the previous night, just in case. All day yesterday she had felt odd, as though she were seeing the world through a yellow filter, and when, in the evening, she had gone to a bar that had once been a local of Paul’s (each successive night saw her go further back into Paul’s past, it seemed), Genie had fallen in with a crowd who vaguely knew him. They looked too cool and at ease with the world to be friends of his. Customers, she guessed. They’d not seen him for a while, they said, but one of them bought Genie a drink and she ended up staying, feeling grimly committed to the evening, becoming increasingly insular with each drink until finally she fell totally silent, feeling like the time she’d got locked in the porch at one of Paul’s squats: alone in the house she’d stepped out into the porch, slammed shut the door behind her and pushed against the front door only to find out that Paul – the last person to leave – had locked her in. And drunk in that bar, surrounded by people but barely aware of them, this was how she’d felt: simultaneously locked in and locked out.

  At some point, she’d found herself deciding that if she was to continue looking for Paul – assuming he was still in London – she would have to stop looking so hard, looking so obvious. She would have to give herself up to chance and see where that took her. So she’d accepted an invitation from two friends of the people who vaguely knew Paul to go on to another bar, where they had met up with some of the friends’ friends, and it was in this spirit of determined randomness that she’d accepted an offer from one of the friends’ friends, after the bar had closed, to go back to his place. She had had to gently fight off his half-hearted advances – this man whose connection to her was as dilute as the degree of active constituent in a homeopathic preparation – before they’d crashed down together on his bed, drunk, like fallen trees.

  Genie could not remember where in London she was until ten minutes later when she opened the main door of the block where the boy lived, and walked out into a street close to what she soon recognised as Smithfield market. Without having a sense of where she was going – but knowing she was not yet ready to go home – she headed for Farringdon station. The sky was white with racing clouds and her face stung from the whipping it was getting from her hair: one of those strong Thames breezes which reminded her that the river was somehow always just around the corner, even though it could not be seen.

  Genie’s London was a limited place, she realised now – a tight circle described by home, college and the few places she went at night – while Paul’s London was unknown to her. She could only search his old London. The one she’d once shared with him. But that search had turned up nothing. She would have to break free of their London altogether if she wanted to increase her chances of finding him. The logical leads, such as they were, had led nowhere. She would have to trust to fate. And now she would meet fate more than halfway. She would tempt it.

  Walking by the market, she passed porters in their bloodied and yellowed white coats, heaving around sides of meat. Big lorries lay panting at the mouths of storage depots and in the gutter she saw the leg of a pig, and its trotter, then further along not quite a pig’s head, but its face. Genie wondered if they were all from the same animal. And then there were the spots of blood on the pavement. They looked like bullet holes, scorchmarks. Further along someone had trodden in blood and left a smeared boot-print. As she walked down Farringdon Road she saw office workers, young women in their cheap imitations of designer heels, wobbling slightly as they walked. Genie noticed that there were no really old people here. No kids either. Only ‘useful’ people. They all wanted to be somebody, she thought, and then she thought of Paul: someone who wanted to be somebody else, or, rather, anyone else but himself. Across the road a tabby cat, striped like a mackerel, stalked the gutter, sniffing at something. It looked out of place here, this domesticated wild thing among all the suits.

  At Farringdon, Genie waited on the bridge for the first train to come in. It was eastbound. Without thinking, she took the right-hand set of stairs and jumped on. Then, as it pulled away, she wondered if perhaps she wouldn’t be more likely to bump into Paul on a subterranean line instead: the Circle line was too airy, too many of the stations part-open to the world outside with cathedral ceilings and pigeons flapping along the platforms. At Embankment she got out, thinking perhaps she’d change to the Northern line, but on a whim she decided to leave the Underground altogether and walk somewhere instead. She was dragged for a moment by a riptide of tourists towards the Thames entrance, until she pulled herself free and walked out onto Villiers Street, past the rows of hooded homeless mummified in their sleeping bags, heads bent monk-like in the warm morning rain. She tried to get a look at their faces. A man by the park gates was selling umbrellas. He must wake up every day praying for rain.

  And all the while, as she turned left into the Strand, past the Gothic hollows of Charing Cross station, past Trafalgar Square and up along Charing Cross Road, past places so familiar she barely saw them any more, these central streets which, unlike the streets at home in Hackney, scarcely felt as though they belonged to her, or if they did, they belonged to all Londoners, streets where all kinds of Londoners came together, past places where memories of Paul through the years were layered one over the other so that here she saw him emerge through the crowds clutching a bag full of paperbacks from a second-hand bookshop to disappear into a side-street, down to Bunjies Folk Cellar, or, there, down tin-pan alley, face pressed to a shop window, looking at the drum-kits and further along, stumbling out of the Astoria, blinking in the too-bright streetlights, fucked and boss-eyed after some night, all of these Pauls oblivious to one another, with Genie catching sight of them one after the other from the corner of her eye as they darted through the crowds, Genie struggling to follow them, she did not realise until she reached it that she had actually had in mind a final destination. The hospital. The hospital where she’d been born. No, not born – she was hungover, confused. The hospital where she’d almost died. She could not call this, her arrival here, now, an accident. But perhaps it would lead to one; perhaps she would meet Paul here, arriving, too late, to visit her.

  Surely, thought Genie, walking slowly around the perimeter of the hospital, when something, someone is so wanted, so that he was almost there in front of her but in some closely aligned parallel universe, utterly unreachable – surely she could, just by wanting him here so badly, will him into existence. Could she not make him materialise in front of her? Summon him like the devil he was?

  Passing a side entrance, she observed a group of people smoking with a kind of desperation that made them seem troubled. And they were a group, not simply the relatives of patients or hospital staff on a break gathered casually. They had apparently arranged to meet here. The group seemed to be mainly men in their late twenties to forties, with only a few women, one of them beautifully turned-out, wrapped in a butter-coloured pashmina, whose face, when she turned in Genie’s direction, looked deeply ravaged despite the care she had obviously taken with her appearance. The woman was moving to hug a new arrival, her pashmina swinging loose to shroud them both.

  When she stood back to readjust it, Genie had a clear view of the man who had just joined them. She cried out then in surprise. At times like this, hungover, Genie had only a fragile sense of who she was, like bad reception on an analogue TV, one of those old black and white ones with the calligraphic aerials: a slight movement, a shift in perspective and she lost the picture. In her shaky state, coincidence was not a rare but meaningless phenomenon. In this state, it felt siniste
r. This coincidence could mean nothing or everything. She had lost the picture but she had been right after all to stare more closely at the static and find meaning in it. She’d been right all along, she thought, as she ran over to the group, and to Sol.

  The Dragon Bar on Leonard Street had been a favourite of Paul’s when he’d lived in the squat with Sol on Kingsland Road, but no one ever saw him here these days. The clientele had changed. These people were young, or still knew how to pass as young. Paul had brought Genie here just after her graduation, to celebrate. He’d looked around at these unknown faces and said something odd about wasted talent: about knowing you’d wasted your talent when you turned the bend – when you began to recognise all the places you had passed on your way to whatever point it was that you’d started going backwards. Whatever he’d meant by that. He’d been smoking a lot of weed at the time. And that jacket! It was the one she and Mam had got him for his sixteenth. He’d wanted a leather jacket, the heavy, creaking, rock-god kind, but they’d got him a leatherette bomber from Ridley Road. That was the time Paul had taken to wearing it again. Twenty-six and as skinny as he’d been as a teenager. He’d worn it so often that in the end the leatherette flaked away when he rubbed it, like dead skin. And now she remembered something else he’d said that night. About how lately almost everyone he saw reminded him of someone he’d once known. A lot of things Paul said had been lost at sea. They washed up now and again.