by Luke Kennard
Karl could faintly hear Genevieve’s teeth tapping out an angry reply, although she wasn’t moving her lips.
‘Karl, you’ve at least had a look at what the world’s like now and tried to adapt accordingly,’ said Stu. ‘All the content creation. But really, what you’re doing … It’s like you’re scalping tickets when you could be up on stage.’
‘Honestly,’ said Janna, ‘you both need to sit down and take a good hard look at yourselves, at your skills, at your ample capabilities and the potential they give you to thrive, for God’s sake. Literally just write a list. You’ve both made some terrible life decisions—’
‘Karl, what was your MA in?’ Stu interjected.
‘The Metaphysical Poets,’ said Karl.
‘You’ve both made some rotten life decisions, but we don’t blame you for that at all,’ said Janna. ‘You’ve been lied to and misdirected your whole lives.’
‘It’s not that you were allowed to do whatever you wanted, or even that you were told to,’ said Stu.
‘You weren’t given a choice,’ said Janna. ‘I know what school was like when you were there – basically a big car showroom for unprincipled “universities”.’ She did scare quotes.
‘You were forced, kicking and screaming, to follow your dreams,’ said Stu. ‘That’s our generation’s fault.’
‘I’m going to make a suggestion,’ said Janna. ‘You don’t need to react to it now. Just let it filter down and maybe write about it in your journals. It’s non-compulsory, of course. The suggestion is this: within the first month of The Transition you should both quit your jobs.’
‘Ha!’ said Genevieve.
‘This is …’ said Karl.
‘Nobody’s going to pay you to feel sorry for yourself,’ said Stu. ‘Unless you’re planning to lobby to bring back the Arts Council.’
‘Just think about what I said,’ said Janna. ‘At some point it was instilled in you that money isn’t important. Think hard about that. Think about the people who told you that. Did they live in collectives growing their own beetroots and selling woven baskets? No. They were probably comfortable, well-off professionals who thought they could live vicariously through you.’
‘It’s the post-structuralists,’ said Stu. ‘They told you: don’t read the classics – study EastEnders. But what had they read? The classics!’
‘Stu, honestly, it’s not as if you’ve read the classics,’ said Janna.
‘What little I read,’ said Stu, ‘it had better be classic, that’s all.’
‘THE BLOODY NERVE,’ said Genevieve. She was straightening her hair and the smell of coconut oil hung in the room. Neither of them had said anything for half an hour.
‘Keep smiling,’ said Karl.
‘You think I should quit teaching?’ said Genevieve, letting the straighteners drop to her lap.
‘God, of course not,’ said Karl. He was almost superstitious about the teaching profession. It had rescued Genevieve, and she, in turn, rescued the kids who spent every break time getting into fights, who couldn’t write the letter e or the number 8, whose parents arrived drunk at the gates.
‘She’s so needy,’ said Genevieve. ‘She needs everyone to approve of her. That’s all this is. She needs me to approve of her.’
‘Exactly,’ said Karl. ‘This is more about them than it is about us. We just have to play along for six months and walk away.’
‘On the other hand,’ said Genevieve, ‘I feel so, so sick of teaching, sometimes.’
‘We’ve talked about this,’ said Karl. ‘Job satisfaction is a bourgeois affectation.’
‘The levels, the paperwork, the marks for six-year-olds; the fact that they’ll do absolutely anything to prevent you from having a real, lasting impact on the most difficult kids. Remember I set up that lunchtime club? They actually hate me for doing that. They think I’m trying to be a hero. You know Cathy’s leaving?’ Genevieve took a bite of an apple she must have picked up downstairs and wandered over to the skylight.
‘You do have a lasting impact. Everything you do in that school makes a significant improvement to the state of the human race,’ said Karl, trying to play it relatively cool. ‘How many people can say that? I know I can’t.’
She crunched her apple again.
‘You want some of this? The snake said it was fine. Look, Karl, relax. It’s just interesting to be offered a way out, isn’t it? Janna would probably go to the school herself and cancel my contract. I’d love to see Upton trying to deal with Janna. She’d crush him.’
Karl stood behind Genevieve, put his hands on her shoulders and then started fiddling with the clasp of her bra.
‘Don’t. It makes me feel sleepy. You know that.’
‘What’s wrong with feeling sleepy?’
‘I’ve got marking to do.’
‘Just stick a gold star on everything.’
14
THE NEXT NIGHT it seemed that Genevieve and Janna had put the conversation out of their minds. Karl entered the room with two cups of camomile tea and they were laughing at something in a copy of Vogue. When they all had their drinks and Karl had sat down by the cast-iron coffee table, Stu handed Genevieve a gold coin with £100 engraved on it.
‘Is this real?’
‘Seed money,’ he said. ‘Representative of it, anyway. Little competition. All the other couples on The Transition have been given one of these tonight – ours tend to win this. The money will be on your tablets and you have to invest it, over the rest of this month. The couple to bring in the most wins an upgrade to their first home: an extra room, an extension – there are various options.’
‘Goody. Do we get to keep the money?’ said Genevieve.
‘The money goes to the charity of your choice,’ said Stu.
They were meeting late because Genevieve had had lesson prep to do, which she hadn’t finished until almost nine. Now she was wearing pyjamas decorated with a black cat-face motif and sitting cross-legged on the sofa. Girlish. Karl wasn’t sure whether he liked it. On the landing, on their way down, he caught her as she jumped off the ladder, an arm under her thighs, and lowered her to the floor. He hugged her and felt her body through the thin material. The sensation of her skin against the material. It felt as if his lungs were filling with tiny glowing asterisks. He didn’t know what he thought about her sitting there in front of Stu. It gave him the tense feeling of waiting for results, opening a bank statement. He enjoyed it and flinched from it in equal measure. What was it he liked about men admiring his wife? Did he want them to be jealous? Did he want Stu to feel jealous? No. It wasn’t about that at all. It was … He didn’t examine the thought any further.
Janna was talking about patrons and investors; words like networking being overused, misunderstood. He liked her voice. It was clipped and anxious when she was ‘teaching’, self-conscious in a way that made Karl want to take her hand and say, hey, you’re doing really well, even though he wasn’t really listening to her. He stared at the thick grey impasto on the big canvas behind her. It was like the surface of the moon. He thought about how many thousands of pounds the painting must have cost. The lilies needed refreshing. Genevieve giggled again.
She was only giggling to be polite, he supposed, but it sounded genuine. It seemed more real than many of the things she said to Karl, many of the noises: laughs, sighs, hmms. Sometimes she said, ‘That’s funny’ instead of laughing. Occasionally, he was quite sure of this, she disguised a yell of pure rage behind a sneeze. The sneeze was real; it was an opportunistic yell, which might as well have come out then, when she happened to need to sneeze, as ever.
Karl was able to come out of his reverie to say, ‘No, none whatsoever,’ when Stu assumed that Karl hadn’t made any private pension arrangements.
And when he thought about it, Genevieve never used to laugh at anything he said but at something intrinsically funny about him. The first time he met Genevieve (she was a friend of a friend of Keston’s) he spent as much of the night as he could st
aring at her without being creepy, pretending he was looking over her head at someone at another table, or checking the time or trying to catch someone’s attention at the bar. He didn’t say a word to her until his friends were leaving and he said, ‘Well, bye,’ and she laughed.
They spoke, once after that, on the flimsy intra-hall telephones, which allowed you to make calls between rooms for free.
‘Hello?’ said Karl.
Genevieve started laughing.
‘Is this Genevieve?’
‘Yes, this is Genevieve.’
‘Why are you laughing?’
‘Because you’re funny.’
‘Okay,’ said Karl. ‘I was just calling to see—’
‘Karl,’ she interrupted, ‘I called you.’
‘Oh, did you?’ said Karl. ‘Oh dear.’
15
IT WAS THE FIRST Monday of half term and Genevieve had an Inset day – IT training – which started late. Lying in bed idly masturbating and thinking about how he might try to convince her to have sex, which was never really on the cards in the morning, Karl was puzzled to hear the pneumatic sound of the espresso machine several times in a row without the accompanying smell of coffee. Espresso machines always sounded like they were about to blow to bits, but there it was again, louder than before, and this meant either that Genevieve was failing to get Janna and Stu’s espresso machine to work, or that she was destroying Janna and Stu’s espresso machine. The two weren’t mutually exclusive. He shimmied down the ladder and ran down both flights of stairs, but when he entered the kitchen she turned around with a smile.
‘Try this.’ She handed him a little red cup. He took a sip. Swallowed.
‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting,’ he said.
‘Hmm,’ said Genevieve, her head tilted to one side, disappointed.
The granite worktop was strewn with bits of torn and crumpled paper.
‘What’s all the …?’
He picked one up. They were empty teabags. Ten … twenty of them.
‘Tea espresso,’ said Genevieve.
‘I think you’ve invented the worst thing ever.’
‘I just thought it would be fun,’ said Genevieve.
Karl ran a glass of water, gargled and spat into the sink.
‘How long have you been up?’
‘Well,’ said Genevieve. ‘Don’t be angry, but I got carried away with the stock market. Our little £100 is now £134. I’ve been up since three.’
Karl made a face he hoped looked like Munch’s Scream.
‘That’s a thirty-four per cent return,’ said Genevieve. ‘Not bad for one day, right?’
Karl got very upset when Genevieve woke up before six in the morning. It made him worry that she was losing her mind.
‘You know I hate it when you don’t sleep,’ he said.
‘I thought you’d be pleased!’
‘I’m impressed that you made £34,’ said Karl.
‘You might have a go at it yourself today,’ said Genevieve. ‘It’s fun! You might at least get involved.’
‘I will. Promise me you won’t get up early tomorrow morning?’
‘Oh, Karl, you’re obsessed. I got carried away. I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t understand how much it worries me.’
‘I’d understand if I was actually getting ill,’ said Genevieve. ‘This is different.’
‘You always say it’s different,’ said Karl, ‘and it’s never different. You start off not sleeping, then you start talking too fast, then you take on, like, a hundred different things, then you can’t even order a cup of coffee without confusing everyone, and then I become an enemy to you.’
‘You sound like a little boy with a burst balloon.’
‘You’re taking your meds, aren’t you?’
Genevieve stiffened as if he had told her there was an intruder in the house.
‘Yes, I’m taking them,’ she said, quietly.
‘Then it makes me wonder if they need adjusting. We could make an appointment to see Dr Blend.’
‘Karl,’ said Genevieve, ‘have you ever read The Yellow Wallpaper?’
‘Genevieve,’ said Karl. ‘Have you ever read Tender is the Night?’
‘There’s a growing body of evidence that the whole psycho-pharmacopoeia is just like throwing darts over your shoulder at a dartboard five hundred metres away.’
‘Who paid for that research? Chiropractors? Big Yoga?’
‘There are alternatives,’ said Genevieve. ‘And should I choose to explore them, this strikes me as a fairly good time to do it.’
‘Living with strangers,’ said Karl. ‘I don’t want you to get ill here. I don’t know what I’d do.’
‘I have to go to work. Can you stop looking at the floor? I hate it when you’re like this.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Karl. ‘Blame it on me. It’s me.’
He stared at the carpet. He liked the carpet – it was black and cream and looked like a tile pattern. He ran his eyes around the pattern until Genevieve sighed and left the house, closing the front door just hard enough.
16
IN KARL’S FIFTH review of a Space Pen which could write on any surface, even underwater, he chose to focus on the act of writing as being that which separates us from beasts. But what if you could separate yourself from your fellow man, too? he argued. He had heard her on the stairs, but he was surprised when Genevieve opened a can behind his neck. He smelled cider.
‘I’m going to go out,’ she said. ‘Is that okay? Celebrate the holiday.’
‘It’s Monday,’ said Karl.
‘Yeah, town will be lousy with teachers.’
‘No, I mean it’s not Drinking Day.’
‘Oh, I checked with Janna,’ said Genevieve. ‘It’s fine. They’re not insane, Karl. I said Is it okay if I go out with some colleagues? and she said, Oh, God, of course, you don’t need to ask. Then she gave me twenty quid and said Have one on me.’
‘Nice of her.’
‘You won’t worry?’
Karl looked at Genevieve. Her pupils were normal-sized. She sounded like herself. She was wearing a black beaded necklace he had bought her when they were students.
‘I’m sorry about this morning,’ he said.
‘It’s fine. You’re hyper-vigilant. No worries.’
‘No worries,’ said Karl. The phrase always made him think of serious academic books with pithy titles: On Worries.
Genevieve propped her tablet up on the old steamer trunk. ‘Let’s see how our hundred quid is doing,’ she said.
‘Hyper-vigilant?’
‘One hundred and fifty-six!’ said Genevieve gaily. ‘I’m a natural! Buy! Buy! Sell! Sell!’
Karl enjoyed staying in. He loved reading Retro Gamer while channel-hopping between sitcom repeats, music videos and panel shows to create the illusion that he was being entertained. Most of all, he loved being free of the responsibility of having a good time. As a pleasant corollary, all of this non-effort was received by Genevieve as benevolence.
He’d watched her get ready, straighten her hair, choose an outfit. When she sat on the bed in her underwear he curled around her hips like a cat.
‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’
‘No, go,’ he said. ‘Have a good time, say hi to the girls from me.’
When she was gone, he made a ready-salted-crisp sandwich, with a pint glass of Ribena, took off his clothes and crawled under the duvet with the remote. In their old flat he would fall asleep with the TV on, wake up just enough to switch it off a few hours later, then wake up again to find his wife next to him, smelling of stale smoke with high notes of alcohol. He’d kiss her.
‘You’re a nice boy,’ she’d murmur. ‘You’re one of the only ones.’
But that night Karl drifted into a deep sleep then came round to find that it was 6 a.m. and Genevieve still wasn’t home. He grabbed for the lamp on his bedside table, tried calling her tablet and it rang from her bedside table. Genevieve never took her tablet
with her. Karl put on some jeans and a yellow Belle and Sebastian T-shirt and began to climb down the ladder, blood thumping in his ears.
Genevieve was still in her going-out dress, asleep on the white sofa with a beaded blanket tucked around her.
‘Genevieve?’ he said, rubbing her shoulder so the beads clacked together. She stirred. ‘Genevieve.’
‘Oh.’ Genevieve opened her eyes. ‘What time is it?’
‘I was worried.’
‘Worried?’ she yawned.
‘It’s six. I thought you were still out.’
‘I got home at midnight, silly.’ She shuffled into a sitting position and adjusted her dress. ‘I stayed up talking to Janna. I must have fallen asleep.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘Did I have a good night, do you mean? Don’t be weird. Sit down.’
He looked at her.
‘Why not come upstairs?’
‘I feel a bit sick.’
They took turns in the award-winning shower, Karl second. He tightened the towel around his waist, took slightly too much product out of the tub and ran it through his hair.
‘Looking good,’ said Genevieve.
‘I’m a new man.’
He looked at her, wrapped in only a scarf, sprawled on the bed with a Teach Yourself Italian book.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘Even with a hangover you’re beautiful.’
‘Vicino … Lontano. You’re blinded by love.’
‘You always say that,’ said Karl. ‘The opposite is true. I don’t even like you. I just think you’re beautiful. It’s what keeps us together.’
‘Ho una prenotazione. You know, I realised something last night,’ said Genevieve.
‘Mm-hmm?’
‘No, be more interested, say: Oh? What did you realise?’
‘What did you realise?’
Genevieve sat up and closed her book.
‘I don’t really miss what I thought I missed,’ she said. ‘What I thought of as freedom … It’s not much fun, really. I’d just as soon stay in and learn Italian.’