Dispossession

by Chaz Brenchley

Okay. I could be almost blasé about this now; unfamiliarity was becoming commonplace. But it was strange none the less, trying to imagine the state of mind I must have been in, to have done this. Losing the bed of a dead brother-in-law, yes, that was more than reasonable, that was right; but to have left or thrown away everything, everything I used to wear seemed so extreme, it was one more thing that I simply couldn’t connect with, on any level.

  I didn’t ask, but I must have made some questioning, doubtful noise, or else my face was asking for me. Suzie chuckled, stroked my cropped hair and said, “Carol assassinated all your old clothes. Went at them with pinking-shears, then sent them round here in a taxi, in boxes, in bits.”

  Very thorough, she must have been. Not only my old, despised court clothes were gone, displaced by smart Italian suits; not only my shabby muckabout jeans and my faded check shirts and my sensible M & S underwear, with designer denims in lieu and silk shirts, socks, boxer shorts and black mini-briefs that looked like they probably cost an extraordinary amount per square cotton centimetre. Every belt and every pair of boots, every tie and every set of cuff links had been replaced. This was another man’s wardrobe I was confronting here, picked with another man’s dress-sense, unless Suzie had made all the choices and our relationship had been so lopsided that I couldn’t once say no.

  It had all been bought with another man’s money, also. There was thousands of pounds’-worth of clothing on those hangers and in those drawers.

  Deverill presumably had done the paying, directly or otherwise. Why he should do so, I still didn’t understand; why I should let him was another question, and becoming more urgent by the hour. Tomorrow, I tried to soothe myself, tomorrow, we’ll turn detective in the morning...

  “Do us both a favour, get changed,” Suzie said. “Those things are smelly. What are you like underneath?”

  “Had a shower before I came.”

  “Good. Are you hungry?”

  “No.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “Yes,” I said, infinitely patient.

  “Okay, then. Find something to wear and come through. If you want your kimono, it’s on the back of the bedroom door. And it’s twice the size of mine, so you can’t get muddled.”

  And then she was discreetly gone, leaving me to raid another man’s clothes. I was too tired to play dressing-up games with those smart suits; and in all honesty, once I’d shucked off the second-hand stuff I’d been wearing all week I really didn’t want to get properly dressed again, however new and clean the clothes.

  So I picked up on Suzie’s suggestion, only surprised that she hadn’t made a command out of it, wear this and this, come on, hurry up, or shall I stay to strip you?

  I pulled on a pair of boxer shorts, suppressing a grunt of pleasure at the feel of good silk settling against my skin; and then I scuttled shyly down the passage to the big front bedroom, where there were indeed two kimonos on hangers on the back of the door. The larger one was underneath, grey and pink, silk again but a completely different grade, heavyweight and protective for all that it was fraying a little at the hems. You couldn’t call this second-hand, though certainly it had been worn before; the only proper word was antique.

  It hung to my ankles when I slipped it on, wrapping me around in reassurance. I tied the belt, resisted the siren call of the nearest mirror, and went barefoot through into the living-room. In this flat, on that floor, splinters were hardly a concern.

  Suzie had made Chinese tea again, there was a steaming pot on the coffee-table and cups with; but there was also a bottle of Macallan and a couple of glasses.

  So happens that Macallan is my favourite drinking whisky. I did not think this coincidence or a lucky guess, I was well past that now.

  She gave me an approving smile, and patted the cushion beside her on the sofa; smile changed to scowl when I sat instead on the floor opposite, with the table between us.

  “Jesus, don’t do me any favours, will you, Jonty?”

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “Big deal.” But that was only a mutter with her eyes averted, giving her away: because for her it was a big deal, that was clear, simply to have me safe back again. For all that she had only the least part of me, the physical body she’d married but not at all the man inside; and for all that even that much wasn’t cooperating, the body wasn’t sitting where it was told and doing what she wanted. She’d settle for this grotesquely difficult situation sooner than what had gone before, the total loss of me.

  Which was another marker to help me plot how deeply I’d entangled her in whatever mesh I’d been making, those few short missing weeks. My heart ached for her, vulnerable and helpless as she seemed, beneath the bluster. Caught like some innocent, blundering fly, I thought she was, in a web of confusions and deceit. I wanted to help her, I wanted to peel sticky threads from her wings and set her free; but I didn’t even know what the deceits were, let alone who had set them or what they were for. All I was contributing here was more confusion.

  Could’ve been me, I thought, deceiving her for some cruel cause of my own; or vice versa, perhaps she was the deceiver and doing it still, doing it even now to keep me muddled...

  “Okay,” I said, taking tea when she passed it to me but reaching for the whisky also, pouring a slug into one glass and then into the other when I glanced the question and had her nod in response. “Answer some questions for me?”

  “Yes,” she said. No hesitation, no equivocation in her: total exposure offered if I wanted it, if I could think of the right questions to ask, and no, surely this girl was not deceiving me.

  “That first night,” I said slowly, watching her face, looking for signals. “I hung around the takeaway, asked you to go for a drink; you brought me here. Yes?”

  “To the club, yes.”

  “You wanted to get into my shorts, you said. Did you manage it?”

  A hint of a smile, and, “Not that first night, but I could’ve done. You were up for it, I reckoned. Easier then than it is now,” glaring at me over her cup, putting it down to light a cigarette, blowing an aggressive cloud of smoke at me. If we’d been on the beach, she’d have kicked sand in my face.

  I just shrugged. “So what did we talk about? What did I say?”

  “Not much, in the end. All tongue-tied you were, like you were suddenly ten years younger and this was your first date ever. It was sweet, really. Weird too, mind, being with a stranger who wouldn’t talk to me. But Lee was there to keep an eye out, and there were friends of mine on the tables too, so I wasn’t worried.”

  “What did we do, then? If I wouldn’t talk?”

  “Well, I talked. For a bit. But I still wasn’t getting much out of you, so we ended up playing snooker. What else would we do?”

  “I don’t play snooker,” I said.

  “You didn’t use to. You do now, a bit. When I can get you in there.” She grinned then, and said, “You’re not exactly a natural talent, but you say you enjoy it.” And then she stopped, seemed to listen to herself, shook her head bemusedly. “This is so strange. Telling you what you like to do...”

  “Stranger hearing it,” I said. “But all right, we played snooker. Anything else?”

  “Not much. You went off about two o’clock, I think, said you really had to get back. At the time I thought you just needed sleep, you looked terrible: pale and jittery, like you’d been overdosing on work and caffeine for weeks. But I guess there was some guilt in there too, because of Carol.”

  “I hadn’t told you about Carol?”

  She shook her head. “Not that night. No. And I didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know. Why spoil something that might be nice, before it even happened? I’m a terrible slut, me. Used to be. That’s why you wanted to marry me, you said, to stop me sleeping around.”

  Did it work? I wanted to ask, meanly; but I thought that might get me slapped again, so I sipped Macallan, savoured its rich sherry flavour and then the bite that comes after, and asked a different question.
/>   “What next, then? Did you chase me?”

  “No, you looked like you could live without the pressure, so I let you go. Didn’t ask for a number or anything. Your choice, if you came back. Actually, I thought probably you wouldn’t: just one more bizarre night, I thought it was, and I’ve had a few of those,” she said, with all the wise experience of twenty-four. “But you turned up again. At the club, the next night. You still looked haunted; but you’d shaved, and you smelled nice, and I don’t think you’d eaten all day, so I took you down to Uncle Tang’s and fed you. We had lobster, because you said you didn’t mind getting messy but you couldn’t use chopsticks. That’s when you told me about Carol.”

  And that memory required a meditative pause, a sip of whisky, a sip of tea, a drag or two on the cigarette; and then, “So I said what are you panting after me for, then? And you said you hated yourself but you couldn’t help it. If I’d been a nice girl, I suppose I would’ve sent you home right then. But I’m not, so I didn’t,” added unnecessarily.

  “After that it became a sort of regular thing, you’d come to the club for an hour or two every night. To wind down, you said, but it never looked like that, you went off as fretted as you’d come. So one night I brought you up here instead of letting you go. Carol would be asleep, you said, but you phoned anyway, and left a message on your answering machine so she wouldn’t be too panicked in the morning; and then I took you to bed.”

  A reminiscent smile from her, that I only wished I could match. It wasn’t only motives and understanding that I’d lost here, there was simple experience too; and yes, I hated myself for it, but yes, I pined for the loss of that one. Didn’t ask for a description, though. Instead, I put a new spin on an old classic. “So how was it for you? How were you feeling about it, I mean? I guess I was fixated, but were you just thinking of it as a one-night stand, or were we starting an affair, or what?”

  “You weren’t fixated,” she told me sternly. “You were in love. You said that. And me—I don’t know. Not then. I liked you, I fancied you, you interested me. That was about it, at the start. I didn’t fall in love with you until I met your mother.”

  “Oh, Christ.” I should have known, I should have guessed she’d have been in there somewhere, stirring away with her fiddling-stick. She’d have to be.

  That did me in, for asking questions. I wasn’t interrogating anyone about my mother, for fear of what answers might come back at me. I drank tea and whisky and watched Suzie smoke, and she seemed content to smoke and drink and watch me in return.

  Slowly my body remembered how late it was, how weary tomorrow would be; and when I’d yawned for the third time in five minutes, and was shifting awkwardly in search of a more comfortable way for my bones to sit within my flesh, Suzie said, “Go to bed, then, why don’t you? If you’re that knackered?”

  I ran a hand down over my face, felt just sheepish enough to tell her. “I guess I was waiting for permission.”

  “Not from me. This is your home, you live here. Do what you like. I’m going to have a bath.”

  o0o

  I cleaned my teeth and went to bed, wishing her no more than a brief, awkward goodnight and closing as many doors as there were between us.

  No pyjamas, only cool cotton and silk against my skin, the lightness of a feather duvet over my back and the unfamiliar firmness of a futon beneath me. I stretched across its width, and lay on my belly thinking that even with Dolphus on guard beside me—brought home again from the hospital and back in what was clearly his regular place, and thank you, Suzie—I’d still never sleep.

  And did sleep, swiftly and easily; and then was startled awake again sometime in the dark, by the sharp sound of a door clicking open.

  Took me a second to get a grip, to remember where and therefore who I was. That done, though, it wasn’t hard to identify bare feet padding on bare boards.

  More sounds, silk on skin: or silk off skin, rather, another kimono falling to the floor. And then a hint of a shift in the futon’s frame, as another lighter weight came onto it. Ever the gentleman, I stopped pretending to sleep and slithered a little way across, to make room.

  Didn’t roll over, though. Lay with my back to her, not so much of a gentleman after all. I was still getting more messages than I wanted, learning more than I needed to know. Every fractional hesitation in her body as she slipped under the duvet, every tight little breath told me stuff I didn’t want to hear.

  And then—two fingers to hesitancy, and much more what I would have expected from her—she wrapped her arms tight around me and was saying it all aloud, mumbling into my shoulder blade so that I picked it up by bone induction mostly, as her lips traced the shapes of the words against my skin.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t do it, I can’t sleep through there with you in here. I can’t bear it. I’ve missed you so much, I’ve been so scared; and I don’t care if you’re not who I think you are. You look like him and you smell like him and you feel like him, your voice sounds right, everything’s right for me except what you say, so don’t say anything, right?” A hand came up to touch my lips to silence; the fingers lingered like a kiss. “You don’t have to talk, I’ll do all the talking. Just don’t, don’t throw me out of bed...”

  Well, I’d never done that to a girl yet; and I’d slept with some I didn’t pretend to love, though not for a long time now. The problem I had was with the agenda that got into bed alongside Suzie. She had too much invested here, and I nowhere near enough. That imbalance was perilous to both of us, I thought.

  So no, I didn’t throw her out of bed and no, obedient to instructions I didn’t speak; but no, neither did I turn within the circle of her arms to make a gift to her, my body as playground, reassurance, another definition of home.

  Nearly she took it anyway, her hands sliding down now, over chest and stomach and further down; but they found the waistband of those boxer shorts that I was wearing still and stopped at the elastic, sensitive to messages.

  “Oh, you bastard,” breathed into my ear on half a chuckle, half a sob. “What is this, a last line of defence?”

  I just grunted, trying to make it non-committal though I guess she took it for a “yes”. At any rate, the fingers of both her hands slid in under the waistband but paused politely at their first touch of pubic hair, making a V together like an arrow-head directed at my groin, dangerous, threatening, too damn close. And when I made no move, either to encourage or repel, she sighed against my spine and left them there, nestling a little closer so that her neat naked body touched me at all the points it could.

  Now truly sleep was impossible. For her also, I thought: she wasn’t talking any more and only her skin moved in little involuntary twitches against mine, but I didn’t believe she was sleeping. We lay there with nothing to share beyond the moment and its pain, and even our pain was individual, each of us suffered alone and she far more than I. At the last, when I guess she couldn’t bear it any longer, she inched cautiously away from me and turned her back, coiled up on the far side of the futon and tried not to touch me at all.

  After a couple of minutes I thought I heard her crying, as quietly as she could manage; but I was trapped by my own pretence, and could offer her nothing of comfort. I lay still, and waited till that wanton sleep came back.

  Seven: C’est La Ville, C’est La Gare

  Suzie was gone when I woke again, some time gone. Strong sunlight lay like a bar across her pillow, squeezing its way in between the curtains, but the sheet that side was cool.

  Not I was cool: hot and sticky under the duvet, bladder-full, I unpeeled myself from the futon’s unexpected comfort and blundered in my boxer shorts all through the flat towards the bathroom.

  Suzie watched me from the kitchen door, chewing on an apple. Grinning behind it, I thought, at my ungainly, uncool hurry; but only her hand offered me a greeting, and that was subdued. A half-wave with no flourishes, uncertainty to match my own.

  Knowing she was out there, sure she’d be waiting with som
e ambush I couldn’t predict or prepare against, I took longer than I might have done. After a piss I tested out her power shower with the jet as hard and hot as I could stand it, pounding against the back of my neck to blast my bones awake. I cleaned my teeth and then I shaved with care, not to give any bloody hostages to unkind fortune, or to Suzie Chu Marks; and in her bathroom cabinet I found my own brand of aftershave, in among other male toiletries I neither knew nor used. Not her brother’s, surely; I was getting on top of this game now. I guessed they’d turn out to be mine: gifts from her or else the choices of that unknown, that stranger, the Jonty Marks she’d married and I’d mislaid.

  Clean and dried and sharply scented, my mind no longer sodden stupid after a hard sleep, I finally felt ready to face her. So I unbolted the bathroom door and walked out to find a steaming cafetière on the table with a mug beside it and a saucer full of pills and capsules.

  She was back in the kitchen doorway again, dressed in loose silk shirt and leggings, cradling a cup in her hands and leaning oh-so-casually against the jamb, knowing precisely the picture that she made. She offered me a small smile and said, “Drink. Eat.”

  “Not my idea of breakfast,” I said, prodding a finger at the pills, sliding them around in their saucer. “What are they?”

  “Multivitamins, ginseng, guarana. Good for you. And lots of vitamin C. We’ll go down to Uncle Han’s later, see what he says, but these’ll do for now.”

  I said, “Linus Pauling died, you know. Death on the high C’s,” trying to turn that smile of hers more real; but then I swallowed every one of those damn pills, washing each one down with a gulp of coffee. Continental high-roast, blisteringly hot and mind-blisteringly strong: my bean and just the way I like it. Nothing changed there, at least. This was a different message, I know you inside out.

  I sat down for a second mug, and after a bit let my head topple back, my eyes close. Foolish man, dangerous action: she read ‘vulnerable’ and zoomed straight in there. Her fingers closed on my shoulders and worked them a little, somewhere indecisively between massage and caress. Then they did a little shiatsu on my neck and skull, and she said, “I knew I should’ve chucked that aftershave. Now I’m going to have to convert you all over again. Nice smell, nasty smell—it’s like training a dog. I’m patient, though. I’m the soul of patience. You can keep it on for today, if it makes you feel at home. Go get dressed, and I’ll fix you breakfast. What do you want?”