Another Country

by Anjali Joseph

  She surfed, too, the body parts around her. One day, in bed, Richard had said that when he looked at women it wasn’t in the way she had feared. Or rather, that her fears weren’t sufficiently comprehensive. ‘It’s not necessarily just someone who looks really beautiful,’ he said. ‘Half the time, I’m looking at their clothes, or how they’ve put together a look.’

  ‘But not all the time.’

  He’d giggled, perhaps at his own audacity. ‘When you look in a more sexual way, I suppose there’s an element of looking at individual body parts. Sometimes you see a great arse, or a nice pair of breasts. You’re not really looking at the person as a whole.’

  One cold afternoon, when she was in between jobs, Leela had gone to her house and surfed porn on her flatmate Jon’s computer. The images of women with exaggerated breasts, tans, and open orifices presented to the viewer had aroused her, but in a way she found embarrassing, as though she’d protested a lack of hunger, then, pressed to eat junk food, overeaten anyway. There was no elegance to this desire.

  Still, since that conversation, she’d found herself trying to replicate Richard’s ruthless gaze; in public places, she let her eyes rifle women’s bodies. Breasts? A bit saggy. Bum? Large. But the girl over there had buttocks that rose in a high curve like those in underwear advertisements. She now turned, as though subliminally aware of Leela’s thoughts, and gave Leela a hard look. Leela, embarrassed, turned away. The tube thundered through its endless tunnel.

  ‘Hi sweetie.’ Tall, friendly, he opened the door for her, ran a hand through his hair, smiled. Leela leaned across for a kiss. She was seething.

  ‘How was the day?’ she asked.

  ‘Good. I thought I wouldn’t get off early but I did. We’ve submitted the presentation, so they’ve got to get back to us.’

  ‘Great.’

  She followed him to the kitchen.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’

  ‘Mm.’ She put down her bag. ‘I’m thinking I’ll pack and get to my place tonight.’

  ‘Oh, really? Dad isn’t getting here till around lunchtime tomorrow.’

  ‘Yeah, but, whatever, it’d be nice to wake up at home, have the day.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Glass in hand, she went to the bedroom and began to take clothes out of her drawer.

  Richard appeared in the doorway, hand in hair. ‘I could put some stuff in the spare room under the bed if you want.’

  Leela, on her knees amid a collection of Tesco bags, ground her teeth. ‘Why?’

  ‘If you don’t want to carry it all back.’

  ‘Oh, I think it’s simpler.’ She stuffed the errant leg of a pair of tights into another bag, and began to carry several of them towards the hall.

  ‘You don’t have to go tonight,’ Richard repeated.

  ‘I’d rather.’ She turned on her heel and went back towards the bags.

  ‘Okay.’

  They sat with plates of saffron risotto in tiny servings. Leela drank more, and poured more wine into Richard’s glass, then into her own. She didn’t care, anyway. The wine’s taste altered; from dry and reminiscent of lemons, it became sourer. Richard went to the kitchen to get the next dish, skate with capers and tomatoes. They’d eaten something similar in France in the summer, when they’d gone to the wedding of one of his friends. The bride had asked Leela if she and Richard planned to marry.

  ‘I don’t know if he wants to,’ Leela had said.

  Catherine had looked at her directly, and tucked her blonde hair behind her ear. ‘Set yourself a time limit,’ she advised. ‘I did that with Tom. I told myself, three years and you’re out. By the time he asked me, I was mentally dividing up our furniture.’

  Leela had laughed, but the conversation had stayed with her.

  ‘Why can’t we just move in together?’ she now asked Richard for the millionth time.

  He grinned. ‘We basically do live together.’

  ‘But this isn’t my space’, a term he favoured, as in, “I like what you’ve done with this space”.

  ‘You have your stuff here.’

  ‘I have to move out when your dad’s here.’

  ‘He’s hardly ever here.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  They sat down with the fish, which was excellently cooked.

  ‘The fish is nice,’ Leela said.

  Richard looked troubled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I feel like you’re never satisfied.’

  ‘What?’ She felt apprehension mixed with the usual rage.

  ‘You’re never grateful.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think you should think about all the things I do for you,’ he said doggedly.

  ‘What about all the things I do for you?’

  He looked doubtful, in the slightly aquiline way only a thin person with a long nose can. ‘My point is, you only look at the things that upset you,’ he said. ‘I think you should look at all the things I do that are nice. Like cooking for you.’

  ‘Practically speaking I cook for you more often.’

  ‘You virtually live here.’

  ‘Is that supposed to be some sort of favour?’ She shot up from the sofa.

  ‘Well,’ he said, quietly indignant, ‘you probably have a better lifestyle than you otherwise would because of it.’

  ‘What’s wrong with my lifestyle?’

  ‘This flat. It’s nicer than yours.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my flat. At least I don’t have to shunt out of it every time your dad comes to town.’

  He folded his arms. The oval glass table, which he’d coveted for weeks before he bought it from the antiques market, stood between them like a punctuation mark.

  ‘Oh, hi. I thought I heard you come in last night.’ Jon walked past a still-sleeping Leela, fumbling for the coffee powder in the kitchen, and opened the fridge. The phone began to ring. He bounded out. ‘Jesus! More people trying to sell me something.’

  It struck Leela that these calls were the result of marketing strategies like those Richard and his colleagues put in place, with much plying of PowerPoint, for their clients. Jon, she heard, was having an animated conversation.

  ‘No, he’s not. He’s away. Where? Uh … he’s skiing. Yes. Well, in Colorado. It’s a different season there.’

  Leela grinned.

  ‘But what’s it about?’ Jon enquired tensely, a man on the scent of a falsehood.

  The kettle boiled. Leela tipped a small mountain of coffee into her individual-sized cafetière. A bird sang outside. The day was grey.

  ‘Okay, I’ll tell him, but he’s pretty fucking acute, yeah?’ Jon ended. Leela giggled, spilling coffee powder. The kitchen needed cleaning.

  ‘Did you mean “astute”?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Jon reprovingly. He took the kettle from her and poured hot water into a mug containing a single round tea bag. Immediately the water became dark and rank-smelling.

  Leela sat on the counter, rubbing her eyes and waiting for coffee powder and water to turn into coffee.

  ‘Time for a drastic change?’ Jon said.

  She started. His face was innocent of anything sly.

  There was a long pause. Leela ran a hand through her short hair. ‘Oh. You mean the hair. Yeah – dunno. It seemed like a good idea.’

  ‘Well, it’ll grow,’ Jon pointed out. He looked at her again, as though deciding whether to speak. ‘So Richard’s away?’

  Leela felt herself blush. ‘His dad’s here, so he’s spending time with him.’ She wondered if she’d left any of her plastic bags in the hall.

  Jon nodded, and smiled at her. He stopped stirring his tea, and went back to his room.

  Leela spent a quiet day, each part unfolding with tedious languor. She regarded the bags she’d deposited in her room, and considered unpacking. She cleaned the bath. She went to the small supermarket on the High Road, and bought avocadoes, bread, butter, lemons, coffee, milk, cereal. She came home and put away the food
. She phoned Amy.

  ‘It’s not so much that I miss him. It’s that I resent that he doesn’t miss me.’

  ‘Maybe he’s just not as insecure as you.’

  Leela brooded. She sipped her tea. ‘Can I have sugar?’

  ‘Oh, sorry. It’s in the kitchen.’

  Amy was often free at weekends, because the man she was seeing was attached. Leela, however, was usually busy, having an absorbing, miserable weekend of social engagements, arguing, and sex, with the odd good meal thrown in.

  ‘Do you actually want to spend all your time with him?’ Amy asked.

  ‘No. I just feel better when he’s there.’

  Richard usually took Leela along when he met his friends. ‘There’s nothing I’d say to them if you weren’t here that I wouldn’t say when you are,’ he said. As if in retribution, he tended to come along whenever Leela met a friend; this went down badly with her friends.

  She put in the sugar, stirred it, went to the mirror over the mantelpiece to check how her hair looked today, then turned away before she looked. ‘How are things going with Andrew, anyway?’

  Amy made a face. ‘He’s away for the weekend, with Laura.’

  When she was on her way home, Richard called. She listened to the message as she walked from the tube to her house, through the shadows of trees and other houses on the back street.

  Richard’s voice was warm, slightly hesitant. ‘Hi sweetie, it’s me. I’m sorry we parted on a bad note. Give me a ring if you get this soon. Otherwise, talk to you tomorrow. And Dad’s out for a bit in the afternoon so we could meet up if you want. Anyway, hope you had a good day, and speak to you soon.’

  Leela looked at the screen of her phone. It was almost an hour since his call. The message sat in her heart like ballast, something to be held against the vast flow of indifference, time, transience. He had called. In the moment of freedom from her usual sense of lack, she felt she could do anything: tell him it was over, be alone. She wouldn’t call now, she’d call back tomorrow. She remembered, too, as she let herself into the darkened hall of her house – a place she now considered home but which she’d pass through just as she’d passed through other rented accommodation, other rooms, and made conversation with other flatmates – the time Richard had called her over when his father had last been in town. Richard had moved to the spare room, which had a single bed. They had repaired there, and begun to kiss: he had coaxed Leela into bed. It had struck her that he’d invited her over for an hour so they could have sex and that this was – was it? – an insulting way to treat her. She’d submitted, completely callously, closed her eyes, and thought without guilt of anonymous bodies, large-breasted women, images from pornography: dark, hot openings. She’d come silently and with satisfaction. Afterwards, Richard had said, ‘You felt slightly absent during sex.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ she’d asked.

  ‘You weren’t completely engaged. I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think you’d like it if I did that.’

  But he did make love with his eyes closed, and she was reasonably sure he thought not of her but of other people, and other images as he moved. Did she care? Occasionally she realised she was more detached from the experience than she admitted. Didn’t she, too, think of other things, other pictures, animated by the desire of other, unseen but multiple people?

  She closed the door, leaving behind her the shifting panel of light from the street that came through the stained glass. She went towards her bedroom to get a towel. She’d shower, wash her hair, dry it, put some gunk in it, so she wouldn’t make herself even later in the morning. On her way to work she would, she thought, call Richard, and apologise for the things she’d said.

  Chapter 12

  Installed at her desk at ten past nine, relieved that she wasn’t later, then depressed to be there at all, Leela went into a reverie.

  It was bizarre to think it had only been a year ago, in May, that she’d been considering whether to stay in Paris a second year. There was a simple application process by which teachers had to submit a letter asking to renew their contracts. Nina was going to stay, but Kate wasn’t. Leela had debated the question with herself. She made lists, on foolscap copies, under two columns: Pros and Cons. The lists ran overleaf. She wore a frown. One day, towards the end of the month, in blithe sunshine, she went for a walk towards the Left Bank.

  The lists danced in her head. Paris seemed unreal, or was it she who was without substance? A man bumped into her, and apologised furtively. On the boulevard, the trees were new in leaf. Near Les Halles, stalls bristled with sunglasses in coloured frames. The sun hit the top of the Tour Saint Jacques and shattered everywhere.

  She crossed bridge after bridge, then took a long stroll home as the sun went in. She walked through the new Louvre, whose neoclassical courts frightened her. She would apply to renew her post, she decided. Paris was Paris: she had not yet had enough of it. There would be other encounters, adventures perhaps. She sat on a bench near the river and wondered where Patrick was these days: maybe in his flat, maybe returned to England. They had reached a mutual truce and agreed, silently, to forget each other’s existence, after the episode in January when Leela had gone to see him and, intending to mention dryly and in passing the results (none) of her liaison with Simon, had instead laid out, in rage, all the misdemeanours Patrick’s friend had made and the ways in which his treatment of her, Leela, had been tawdry and unsatisfactory (unreturned messages, a general disappearance, but once, when she’d run into him on the street, an annoyingly bluff chat terminating in a kiss and a suggestion they ‘go for a drink sometime’). Patrick had listened, become more and more politely detached, smoked in silence, then got up, paced about a bit, and suggested it had been Leela’s fault. What had she expected?

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me what he was like?’ she burst out. His eyebrows had shot up; she’d gone too far.

  Now they lived in the same city, or didn’t, and she worked ten minutes from his apartment, and went out in the same area, but in other streets, other bars, and they didn’t see each other.

  She went home and wrote the letter asking to have her contract renewed.

  The next day, when she went to the school office to drop it off, Mme Sarraute shrugged and said applications had officially closed, and, anyway, there had been several excellent candidates from outside the school. It was hardly worth Leela’s putting in her letter.

  She could have insisted, or spoken to the director of teaching. Instead, she took the letter home, cried a single tear, and crumpled it.

  That Sunday, the first of June, she went for another walk along the bridges of Paris, fictional in their loveliness, heedless in their eternity, and the sunshine in which she walked seemed to erase her as she passed through it.

  Nine forty. There were three, perhaps more, hours till lunch, when she would tramp through the next-door shopping mall, which was furnished with further fluorescent light and clothes in mixes of man-made fibres, plastic jewellery, make-up, hair products.

  Gemma, a blonde girl with a triangular smile, was one of the senior administrators in the office where Leela was filling in as Junior Administrative Secretary to Mike Pringle, a man with a beard who took Leela’s job alarmingly seriously. Gemma liked the place where they worked. There was a corporate discount at the Canary Wharf branch of Fitness First, she told Leela, in Leela’s first week.

  ‘Great.’

  ‘It’s a really good gym.’ She fixed Leela in the eye. ‘They have elliptical trainers, treadmills, an aerobics studio. Yoga, if that’s what you’re into.’

  ‘Great.’

  Yesterday Gemma had come back from lunch carrying a plastic bag, and plopped it on Leela’s desk. ‘Look, I got a whole ton of Redken shampoos.’

  ‘Really?’ Leela had no idea what these were, and was in the middle of filling in her time sheet to claim she had been away from her desk for half an hour when it had in fact been an hour and ten minutes.

  ‘Yeah.’ Gemma
bristled with pleasure. ‘I thought I’d treat myself for working so hard.’

  Leela smiled. ‘Sounds like a good idea.’

  She had been in the fluorescent light of the office, then the mall, for too long.

  On the tube, she brooded. Everything in the office conspired against her; even the physical environment. The dull grey low-pile carpet, with its near-imperceptible pattern of blue squares arranged in diagonals; the grey and black desk chairs; the counterfeit wooden tables. The pens were useless yellow ballpoints, the pencils had smudgy erasers. Even the files she was supposed to keep in order – sometimes she did, at other times she shoved ‘Claims Ranked by Order [Mortality]’ into a totally different section, like ‘Mortality [Isle of Wight]’ – came in different colours: red, blue, yellow, green, but depressing tones of those colours. Yellow was a dirty mustard, red a faded maroon, blue a slatey mess, green resembled ageing Astroturf.

  By summer she was getting up early to go to the gym before work. Richard was just waking when she left the flat to walk to the tube, under trees in yellow-green leaf. When she got there, she clutched her card, feeling a mix of assurance – she did the same workout every day – and slight nerves. The presence of other people gave the gym an odd sense of theatre.

  The lights were bright, fluorescent. She felt the nervous energy of morning coffee give way to sweat, and the body took over from the mind, endlessly iterating the same action.

  A dance song played, a pumping beat; the legs worked harder. Next to her, a very thin, tanned blonde woman stepped much faster than Leela. She was using one of the older, more resistant stair machines. She arrived every day before the eight o’clock rush and stayed, with silent determination, on the machine for twenty minutes. She wore sports leggings and a crop top between which her midriff was nearly flat, a yellowish colour. Leela had watched her on many days. She seemed to work by the calorie counter on the machine, and burnt off at least a thousand calories as she moved between the stepper, the treadmill, and the elliptical trainer. When she arrived, she had a slight exoform curve to her belly; by the time she was well into her workout and an exhausted Leela was heading to the changing room, any sign of fullness was gone. She probably aimed to burn off every calorie she had consumed the previous day. In this way her balance with the world remained at nil: she might just as well have not been there.