Another Country

by Anjali Joseph

  She turned on the television: nothing; turned it off, sat exhausted on the floor cushion. The space was snug around her, a small cabin in a large ship.

  She got up and put on a cassette, the first of two in a neat cover printed: ‘Le Nouvel Italien sans peine’.

  Paolo was telephoning Marco.

  Marco non è a casa.

  ‘Marco non è a casa,’ repeated Leela joyously, freed from embarrassment. It was three in the morning; the world was closed for business.

  ‘Who’s calling?’ the woman who had answered asked.

  Sono Paolo.

  Ciao Paolo. Sono Francesca.

  ‘Ciao Francesca!’ Leela repeated with Paolo.

  Marco was not at home, but Francesca would tell him that Paolo had called. He would be back later; he had gone out. How long was Paolo in Milan?

  Leela rewound the dialogue. Though she had moved on to other lessons, she remained attached to the simplicity, perhaps the stupidity of this one, which constituted its sweetness. How transparent they were, Francesca and Paolo! Francesca in a householderly way withheld her identity until she’d verified Paolo’s. The two of them shared their Dantesque names without chuckling over the fact; and Marco, ineffable, slightly mysterious, yet obviously lovable and loved, Marco was not at home.

  She spent the next five minutes replaying in her head the conversation she, after a pause of hesitation, had had with Simon’s answering machine two days earlier. At the start of the week, he had telephoned, said that ‘the other night’ had been fun, asked what she was doing at the weekend, and said he had to go to Dijon for work but would be back on Friday. ‘Maybe we can do something?’

  Why had his apparent diffidence not rung true?

  ‘Yeah, sure, I’m around,’ she’d said quickly.

  ‘Great, give me a call.’

  She’d called on Friday afternoon and left a message; it was now Saturday night, and she hadn’t heard from him. Perhaps he’d stayed in Dijon for the weekend? Perhaps he had friends there? Perhaps he’d met someone, or he wasn’t interested. But he’d said – he’d asked her. But his tone of voice –

  She didn’t want to think about this, and would think about it for hours tonight while time failed to unspool under the fluorescent light. She searched for a cigarette and found one with a baggy fold. She lit it at the cooker and began to smoke without pleasure. The tape whirred and clicked. She pressed play.

  ‘Premier dialogue. Un appel de téléphone.’

  Pronto.

  Buongiorno. E possibile di parlare con Marco, per favore?

  Marco non è a casa.

  The next day at twelve thirty she came out of the métro at Saint-Paul. The carrousel was still and the day cold, the light sharp. Nina arrived, rosy and pleased, with a tall blond young man who smiled. He said hi to Leela and performed the cheek-kissing with her and Kate, who arrived a minute later. They went to the café nearby that Nina liked.

  Leela enquired about the quiche of the day.

  The waiter looked down at her hand. ‘Don’t forget to buy your ticket, Mademoiselle,’ he said.

  Leela glanced down at the writing on her left hand and grinned. ‘I have to buy a train ticket. I’m going home to London for Christmas.’

  The world of the café opened out; indistinct but loud, she heard the conversations of others, and felt the daylight filtering through and reflecting from the large plate glass windows. Nina’s brother smiled at her.

  Chapter 9

  He carried on moving his mouth in sleep, Simon, as though saying unknown words to absent people. It amused Leela, and alarmed her, a moment of what might almost have been intimacy. She’d woken a few minutes earlier, beginning to be conscious that sleep was still near. From the skylight the grey morning flooded in. She sidestepped the accumulation of encouraging things she’d said to herself last night about Simon, about Simon and herself. In the first instant of waking, her mind sharpened itself, and began by distinguishing itself from everything else: the pale light, the bed sheets, the body next to her. The self examined itself and found no rancour: simply, it noted, this wasn’t it.

  Leela squirmed. ‘Why not? Why not this?’ she pursued.

  Silence.

  She put an arm under her head, slid a little away from Simon, and examined him. The skin around his eyes frightened her in the mornings; it looked so old and belaboured. When they were both awake, cooking, drinking, talking, even in bed, the presumption of parity in their ages held; she was never certain enough of herself to know how they related to each other. Now, though, she was appalled by what time could do: how it gathered and stayed in the skin.

  Simon woke and sighed. He lay gazing at the skylight then suddenly put a hand on the far side of Leela’s waist and rolled her over. He looked into her eyes, closed his, sighed, kissed her, felt her bottom.

  ‘Morning,’ she said self-consciously.

  ‘Morning,’ he said at length, the dry politeness of his voice a considerable interval from what his hands and body were doing.

  ‘Right,’ he said, swinging up and out of bed. He began to dress at once. Now she saw him wearing jeans, a white t-shirt, a flannel shirt on top. He frowned, sitting on the bed to put on socks, his shoulders tense. The abruptness with which he peeled himself away from her, and the way her skin, which had been warm against his, was left exposed to the cold air, disconcerted her.

  ‘I’m gonna make some coffee,’ he murmured, and began to disappear down the stairs.

  Leela, alone under the skylight, picked up her clothes then went to the bathroom to shower – the water was never quite hot or plentiful enough – and dress. She examined her face in the mirrored bathroom cabinet and was surprised by its youth, how unmarked it was. Her hair sat flat. She fiddled with it and gave up.

  In the kitchen, she found Simon plunging the top of the cafetière. Seen from behind, he in every way signified a man: his height, the dishevelled hair, his wide shoulders and the swoop of his back and shirt into his jeans.

  She came to rest at his side, and he handed her a cup of coffee. She followed him to the living room, and remembered with a movement of shame, but also amusement, her relief of the evening earlier this week when he’d phoned, his voice both lazy and nervous, to ask if she were free. Leela, clutching the blue receiver, had been abruptly lightened: the world had become less cruel.

  She carried an immoderately-sized bag and struggled through the Gare du Nord, away from the suburban trains and the orange 1970s decor and with relief onto a sleek glass-sided escalator, towards the Eurostar. A ticket slid into a machine at the turnstile, a space-age version of the métro. She queued along airport-like corridors and passed shining pillars, walked down a smooth cream slope into the train.

  She heaved the holdall into a luggage rack and slid into a seat at the window. Its partner remained empty for a long time, and she adjusted her consciousness with pleasure to the unexpected space. Just before the train left an attractive young black woman appeared, toting a toddler and various bags. She accepted aid from a male passenger to stow her things, and sat down next to Leela, sighing. The train moved out of the station, through wrought-iron arches. Then they were in open country.

  But the baby soon shat itself, and the mother, despite having smiled at Leela and returned her greeting when she sat, despite being young and well-dressed and attractive, if a little harried, merely sat there for two and a half hours, not changing his nappy. Leela considered moving, or going to the dining car – something, anything. The infant squirmed, and periodically cried, but he and certainly his mother appeared to bear it all stoically. Leela, uninvolved in their arrangement, resented having to do the same. It smelt. You smell, she thought, regarding the pretty little boy with some distress. He cried and held out his hands to her, I’m sitting in my own shit, help me. No, no, she thought. His mother shrugged and laughed, charming but implacable. Leela tried to read her magazine.

  Patrick McCarthy was on a train too, but he was already in England. He opened a letter
from his sister, already read, and reread a particular paragraph. The train shook its way through East Anglia. He leant back, breathing in air that was stale from the heaters, and sharp when it mixed with cold air from the windows. Fields in winter, the stubble razed and the ground hard, unrolled in a fine golden light.

  After all, he felt affection, a stirring in his self, for this soil and this country. He denied it when he was away, even as far as London, but something in him was content to be at his parents’ and do simple things: walk to the pub for Christmas Eve drinks, get in the car and drive to the supermarket, or have a pointless argument with Camille, wind her up over nothing. It was getting harder to do that: she stopped herself even as her cheeks began to redden, and laughed at him.

  Hampstead, the attic room last night. He’d slept just next to the bookshelf, which made a partition in the room; the eyes of that girl, blue but bordered with something darker, and her loose red mouth as she talked, the way it appeared to move wildly, unrelated to the words he heard in her voice, Simon’s arm and his white torso, the conversation yesterday when they started on the whisky, his feeling of warmth, the creakiness of the floorboards on which his mattress rested, the quiet in the morning, his headache, the light and bustle at the station, a peculiar smell of winter, even of Christmas, again Simon and one of the jokes from last night; he’d forgotten the punchline but he remembered their laughter and someone else’s face, Simon’s mouth, that girl’s eyes, smoke around the table, his own warmth inside (the whisky) and cold in general (the flat), the sense of London spread out around them in the dark, a darkness into which their own names, particularity, importance at this social occasion, their place, in short, completely disappeared: all these and other impressions lay jumbled untidy like dirty cards from a pack that he would have to keep seeing until he could put them in some sort of order. For he’d been drunk, and tired, and so although he had been there, gathering these images, apparently he had also been absent. Where had he been then, while the images were impressing themselves in a store, now to reappear and shuffle randomly until they could be viewed, classified, and put away? It was this he liked least in a hangover.

  The train stopped at Manningtree, then started again: a dirty, wide estuary opened under the sky.

  No one was home. Fresh from the exertions of lugging her bag through the underground, Leela knocked on different parts of the door, tried the bell. She put down the bag, walked round the house, on a street stacked with other such houses, under a plain east London sky, all air and greyness. She sat on the bag. An elderly man in a long collarless coat passed, seemingly raising an eyebrow; his white geometric beard turned away from her. She saw the hem of his kurta emerge from his coat, and felt embarrassed. Another pair of younger, bearded men. Leela looked away.

  ‘Ah!’ Amy’s cry was all of pleasure; it was nonetheless formidable. Leela allowed herself to be swept into a hug, then led to the door.

  ‘Oh no, oh no,’ Amy murmured as she attacked the door and rummaged in her bag. ‘Aaah. Thought I’d lost the keys again.’

  They went in, Leela behind her friend, a flurry of voice and red hair, and then the house, surprisingly modern: steel and leather furniture, expensive sofas.

  ‘It’s very plush,’ Leela said.

  ‘Uh, well, I think it’s a bit fucking expensive. I’d rather live somewhere grottier and cheaper, but the boys found it.’

  ‘Well, at least it’s nice.’

  ‘Let’s get a cup of tea. I told them I was sick at work, to get out in time for you, and now I think I actually am feeling sick.’

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Boring, boring,’ agreed Amy viciously, whacking tea bags into not very clean mugs. ‘It’s disgusting here, disgusting. No one’s washed up in weeks. We’re paying a cleaner a hundred quid to come round and sort it out. I’d do it myself for that much money but I can’t suggest that.’

  They took their mugs up the stairs, into a room that was warm and furnished with all the items Leela recognised as characteristic of her friend: a thick duvet, crumpled into a strange shape; clothes on the floor; black shoes of two types, either high-heeled and intimidating, or flat and mannish, all scuffed and tossed on the ground.

  Amy stooped, dived into a pile of laundry, emerged with something frilled and pink and used it to tie up her hair: a pair of knickers. ‘They’re clean,’ she said.

  Leela grinned. ‘I’ve got a present for you in my bag.’

  ‘Oh, lovely! I don’t have your Christmas present yet, but I’m doing my shopping at home.’

  They were spending Christmas at Amy’s parents’. Leela looked forward to it: as much to the warmth and adult conversation, the sense of an ordered world, as to the comfort.

  ‘I’m feeling really sick, Leela,’ said Amy pathetically.

  ‘Get into bed,’ she suggested. Amy climbed under the duvet.

  ‘I’ll get you some aspirin,’ Leela said.

  ‘Think I just need to sleep,’ she said, rolling herself in the covers. ‘Talk to me for a bit.’

  Leela sat on the other side of the bed, hugging her knees, and they began a conversation; Amy fell asleep within minutes. The room filled with her smell: a mix of musk, tea, and yoghurt.

  Leela went downstairs, feeling she was on a stage set, waiting to be found. The others knew she would be there, but only for a couple of days before she and Amy went away.

  She opened her book, Moon Park. She was reading about cunnilingus in a lift when the door opened, introducing a man in a brown suit and loafers, James, and a blast of cold air.

  ‘Hi Leela,’ James said. He gave her a big grin. They hugged. ‘How was your trip? Did you get in today?’

  ‘In the afternoon.’

  ‘Is Amy here?’ James was getting a pouch of tobacco out of his jacket pocket. He put down a leather briefcase, sat in an armchair near Leela, and began to talk, rolling a cigarette. Tobacco fell on his corduroy suit. He worked in art publishing. How grown up everyone had become.

  ‘How’s work?’ Leela asked.

  James lit the cigarette. Smoke filtered into his blondish hair. ‘Huh?’ he said.

  ‘How’s work?’

  ‘It’s all right.’ He grinned, showing yellow teeth. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right.’ He sighed, shoved his hand in his hair, smoked again. ‘Actually it’s good. They really like me.’

  ‘Oh really? That’s good.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ James drawled. ‘They get me to come along to a lot of important meetings, stuff I’m not even supposed to be at.’

  ‘What’s your actual job?’

  She had to repeat the question because he was making for the kitchen. His shirt cuffs flared. His trousers were too long. His hair became dishevelled. He came back with three cans of lager from a four pack.

  ‘Wannabeer?’

  ‘No thanks. Um – okay.’

  He was a marketing executive, it was his job to promote art books. But his art history degree and ability to talk to anyone had led to his getting to know the editorial department. Now they took him to meetings, and he’d met a professional art historian, and sat in on a meeting with another regular author.

  ‘It’s like a ceramic book. Like updated ceramics.’

  ‘Oh right. My dad used to do pottery.’

  ‘Not pottery. They’re very particular. You’re supposed to call them ceramicists.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s like a really big deal for them.’

  His mobile buzzed, and he waved it. Leela was slightly put out; everyone seemed to have a mobile now. ‘Excuse me for a second.’

  ‘Sure.’

  There was a creaking on the stairs. Ellen came in. She was thinner than Leela remembered her. ‘Let me just take a shower,’ she said after she hugged Leela. ‘I left here at seven this morning.’ She worked in sales, and did shifts. She went to her room, and Leela, disenfranchised, went to see if Amy was up. She was; music blared from her stereo, she was brushing her hair, and putting on make-up.
The honey and lemon Leela had made her was untouched.

  ‘These pills Tom got me are fucking brilliant.’

  Ellen’s boyfriend had gone out to get her the cold remedy. It was now time for everyone to go to the pub on the main road.

  Ellen, Tom, James, Amy and Leela sheltered in the front bar and drank pints, followed by whiskies. Tom’s cheerful face became rosy. Amy became more and more amusing, and loud. She knocked over a drink. James’s chat became more frenetic and less clearly enounced. The lights got brighter. Leela ate crisps. Amy licked the crumbs off the packet. The jukebox was turned off.

  They went home.

  In the dark, Amy whispered grievances. ‘We all pay the same rent, right, but this is the worst room.’

  ‘I think it’s nice,’ said Leela, partly out of loyalty, partly out of a desire not to have the conversation because her own resentment was more than she could handle; she preferred to pretend other people were more easy-going than she, and partly because she did think the room attractive. Admittedly it backed onto a yard and the small window was barred. But the room was big enough for a double bed, there was a fitted wardrobe, and it was possessed of the cosiness and comfort that Amy’s rooms always had. Was it her friend’s presence, or the props that travelled with her: a fringed lamp, a stereo, candles, a bedspread, a rug from home?

  ‘Yeah, well, you should see James’s room, or Tom’s. It’s because they found the house, and James said we’d get dibs on rooms, but he got one of the best ones, and so did Tom, and obviously they made sure Ellen did.’

  How, Leela wondered, did she really feel about Simon? She longed to talk to Amy about him. She would when they were on the train. Perhaps he was her boyfriend. No. They were seeing each other. She felt a warm burst of affection for him, in his absence. It was sweet, he could be sweet. She had someone, that part of her life wasn’t inactive. She fell asleep, the night getting away from her, carrying her like a soporific toddler towards sanity, breakfast, the pretence of function.