The Transition

by Luke Kennard

  ‘Have you ever seen the backs of your teeth?’ the hygienist asked him after a preliminary inspection.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m going to take a picture,’ said the dental hygienist. ‘I’ll have it sent to your tablet. It looks like an ancient ruin back there. You look at it every day and you floss, do you hear me?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Do you want me to tell you about the role of oral bacteria in heart disease?’

  During a period of protracted scraping, the dental hygienist told Karl a story. Or maybe it was a joke – Karl wasn’t sure.

  ‘Two dental hygienists go into a dental hygienist’s,’ he said. ‘The first one says, My dental hygienist told me I’m brushing too hard. The second one says, My dental hygienist says I need to floss more. The dental hygienist says to them, Why are you telling me this? and they say to him, Because we want a second opinion. The dental hygienist calls his old mentor and says, You have to help me, and his mentor, a senior dental hygienist, says, What? And the dental hygienist says, I have two dental hygienists in my office asking for a second opinion. And his mentor says, They need to floss more. They’re brushing too hard.’

  Karl gargled and spat.

  ‘I don’t really know what to take from that,’ said Karl.

  ‘What you need to take from that,’ said the dental hygienist, ‘is that you’re brushing too hard and you need to floss more.’

  Lying in a white fluffy towel gown, Karl tried to read his Telegraph, but Genevieve was too animated. She kept putting down her Teach Yourself Italian and pacing around the little room.

  ‘We’ve wasted most of the week,’ she said. ‘I mean, I know you have work, but we should really do something with our time together, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Karl. ‘I can work harder next week.’

  ‘There are so many things you can do for free,’ said Genevieve. ‘I haven’t even been to the museum since they refitted it. And we should have lunch tomorrow. We can afford to have lunch, surely?’

  ‘I have a £50 note under the mattress,’ said Karl. ‘For a rainy day.’

  Genevieve jumped onto the bed on her knees, waded over to Karl and kissed him on the lips.

  19

  KARL WATCHED HIS wife smoke. It still felt odd, even after four years, calling her his wife. She screwed the cigarette butt into the lemon tree’s fibreglass pot and lit another. He liked to watch her. There was a tremor in her hand as she brought the fresh cigarette to her lips. Her fingernails were painted gold. She only painted her nails when she was exercised about something; the pear-drop tang of wet nail varnish caught in his throat and made him brace himself for impact. The little bottle was still open on the black granite breakfast bar, next to a cup of instant coffee giving off steam like a stage-prop cauldron. It was a Chanel nail varnish called Gold Fiction. He screwed the brush and lid back on. Genevieve smoked as if it fuelled her. She looked over her shoulder and noticed him staring at her from the kitchen window. Her lips curled and she blew smoke towards the house. Even though it was too late to pretend he hadn’t seen her notice him, Karl stepped behind the vast Smart Fridge, duck-egg blue like a Cadillac in a poster, and pretended he was putting something on the noticeboard. Then he stepped back into the middle of the kitchen and held up his hand: hi or stop. Genevieve mouthed something.

  20

  THE VELUX BLIND glowed like a cinema screen at the end of a film. Karl could hear the first sparse chirrups of the dawn chorus, along with what his wife maintained was someone crying in the attic next door. He rolled over and tried to put his arms around Genevieve, but she was stiff and tense. She was so still that he shoved her and she said, ‘What?’ in a voice disconcertingly alert.

  ‘Turn around,’ said Karl. Genevieve sighed and rolled over. Her mouth was slightly open and her eyes were dull, although her eyebrows were raised.

  ‘How long have you been awake?’

  ‘I don’t know. A while.’

  It was as if her pilot light had gone out.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you too.’

  ‘You sound wrong.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You look wrong.’

  Genevieve rolled over again and edged away from him.

  ‘Babe, what is it?’ he said. ‘Why won’t you tell me?’

  ‘I won’t tell you,’ said Genevieve, in a monotone, ‘because there’s nothing to tell. Stop digging.’

  ‘This again,’ said Karl. ‘You’re all over the place. Did you take your medication last night?’

  ‘Oh God, Karl,’ said Genevieve. ‘Yes I did. I’m sorry I’m such a burden on you.’

  THE SECOND TIME he ever met Genevieve she was smoking alone on a balcony outside a crowded hall party. The dress code was classic cinema, but Karl’s household had just come as assistant directors and cameramen, which was how they dealt with every fancy-dress party. Genevieve was dressed as Gene Tierney in Laura. She told him that she loved smoking because it was self-destructive, and that the self-destructive part of people was sort of beautiful, she thought.

  ‘Thanatos,’ said nineteen-year-old Karl, who had just had a seminar on Freudian literary theory. ‘The death drive.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Genevieve, narrowing her eyes. ‘You’re one of those men who likes to tell me things.’

  ‘Oh no, I didn’t mean it like that,’ said Karl. ‘I just wanted to sound knowledgeable.’

  She drew on her cigarette. Karl took a bite of his burger and a lot of sauce fell out of it and over his bleached jeans.

  ‘I put in too much sauce,’ he said. ‘I can never decide, so I just put in every sauce.’

  ‘You’re funny,’ said Genevieve, coughing. ‘I haven’t met anyone funny since I’ve been here.’

  ‘I’m the least funny person I know,’ said Karl.

  The email she sent him ten years later ended: Something is wrong with me and nobody will look after me. This probably isn’t even your email address any more. You probably don’t even remember me. Oh well. Karl’s hands were shaking so badly that he had to retype every sentence at least twice. Of course he remembered her. He had thought of little else since he’d met her, he wrote.

  EVEN NOW HE FOUND arranging a date a little too close to organised fun. Once he’d encouraged Genevieve to get out of the house, they tried to go to the museum, but it was closed on Thursdays.

  ‘Where for lunch then?’ said Karl. He hated the way he sounded when Genevieve was unhappy. The jolly pastor addressing his listless congregation.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Genevieve.

  She was staring at a traffic light. When it changed to green she said, ‘Where would you like to go?’

  ‘This is for you,’ said Karl. ‘What do you want to eat?’

  ‘I’m not really that hungry. Why is it for me?’

  ‘It’s your treat.’

  ‘Why are you putting pressure on me?’

  ‘Oh God, throw me a life ring, Genevieve,’ said Karl.

  ‘Ha.’

  ‘I want you to have a good time, that’s all.’

  ‘You always want something from me. Why can’t you have a good time?’

  He sneered theatrically. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  Genevieve didn’t laugh.

  ‘Shall we go to the new tapas place?’

  ‘Whatever you want.’

  ‘Or there’s the gastropub, which we know is good.’

  ‘Just. Make. A. Decision,’ said Genevieve.

  ‘Right,’ said Karl. ‘We’re going to McDonald’s.’

  They took a window seat next to the children’s section which had plastic toadstools for chairs. The rest of the restaurant appeared to have been refitted by somebody Scandinavian.

  ‘They’ve really spruced this place up,’ said Karl. ‘Is that national? They’re trying to look classy.’

 
‘It’s profoundly sad,’ said Genevieve.

  Karl slurped his strawberry milkshake and chucked a handful of fries into his mouth. On the pavement two pigeons tussled over half a seeded bun.

  ‘Why are we here?’

  ‘Because we’re going to ride this out,’ said Karl. ‘I’m trying to create the most imperfect moment so you don’t feel any pressure to be happy.’ He took a large bite of his Big Mac and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. ‘I’m not expecting it to work,’ he continued. ‘I mean, I’m not expecting it to make you happy. That would be self-defeating.’

  A child was crying and Karl couldn’t hear anyone trying to console it or do anything about it. He hated that.

  ‘You’re funny,’ said his wife.

  21

  ON FRIDAY GENEVIEVE said that she needed to go for a walk by herself. Two hours later she came back wearing a floor-length wax jacket with a billowing hood. It smelled like a carpet showroom and looked several sizes too big for her. She kept it on, sat on the edge of their bed and kicked her legs. Karl looked up from his screen.

  ‘What are you wearing?’ he said.

  ‘It’s a coat. It rained. I was cold.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Charity shop. You don’t like it?’

  ‘You look like the widow of a farmer who killed himself because of his wife’s coat,’ said Karl. Genevieve didn’t say anything, so he said, ‘Sorry. I’m being a dick. I just … I love your taste in clothes. I love how you dress. And it doesn’t look like something you’d normally choose. But you should wear whatever makes you happy.’

  ‘Why do you love me?’ said Genevieve.

  ‘Genevieve.’

  ‘Seriously. What are you doing with me?’

  ‘The week I met you,’ said Karl, ‘I couldn’t eat. After I met you, I couldn’t think about anything else. The way you talked to people … You were like the first genuine person I’d ever met.’

  ‘That’s just silly,’ said Genevieve. ‘You fancied me.’

  ‘I was enthralled. Still am.’

  She furrowed her brow. ‘I don’t feel like there’s anything to me.’

  ‘It’s the coat,’ said Karl, sitting next to her and taking her hand. ‘It’s cursed.’

  ‘I feel like …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I … I don’t want to say it.’

  ‘What don’t you want to say?’

  ‘I …’ She took a deep breath.

  ‘You can tell me. It doesn’t matter what it is.’

  ‘No,’ said Genevieve. ‘It’s best if some things stay thoughts. I don’t really feel anything at all right now.’

  ‘This’ll pass,’ said Karl. ‘It doesn’t feel like it, but it will.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t?’

  ‘Well,’ said Karl. ‘I suppose we won’t know if it’s going to pass until it passes.’

  In the afternoon Karl reviewed blackout curtains while Genevieve lay in bed playing the stock market and taking breaks to read her Italian guide. The coat was hanging over the cupboard door and Karl planned to secretly dispose of it the next time Genevieve was at work. She barely spoke other than to say thank you, in Italian, for two cups of tea at an interval of one and a half hours. Eventually she fell asleep.

  Karl got a new assignment from Study Sherpas©: a third-year student on a literature and psychoanalysis module. Karl knew his departments and this one was notoriously batshit. In the past he’d done well taking books from his childhood out of context, so he decided to go with that again and typed:

  Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice: Baudrillard vs Deleuze’s Simulacrum.

  The Tale of Two Bad Mice concerned a mouse married couple, Tom Thumb and his wife Hunca Munca, infiltrating a doll’s house and trying to eat the beautiful food laid out on the table. When the food turned out to be fake plaster models, the mice went on a rampage, smashing everything and trying to burn it in the doll’s-house fire, which was also fake. He paused in his first paragraph to check a date.

  Karl also had a message from a randomly generated account: ‘Hello. You are receiving this message because you expressed an interest in our band. If you wish to stop receiving these updates please unsubscribe. What did you think of our demo tape? We are eager to generate user feedback. not_all_transition have released their first EP in two years: T. Piven’s The Trapeze, described by the NME as “necessary”.’

  Karl remembered the name of the book from the website, so between jobs he decided to look up T. Piven’s The Trapeze. He checked eBeW, but could find no record of the book’s existence, let alone a full scan. He conducted an image search and found copies of the front cover, but they were oddly various. The first was a small, cheap and battered-looking hardback which appeared to have a spelling mistake: THE TRAPEEZE T. PIVEN in foil on one line. He swept past it. The second cover looked like a Penguin Modern Classic from the seventies, a Giorgio de Chirico-style print of an isolated figure in the high window of a grey obelisk, dental-green border with sans-serif title and author at the top. The next looked like a children’s book: a simple, winsome illustration of an acrobat in a harlequin outfit hanging by one foot from a trapeze in motion. T. Piven’s The Trapeze was superimposed in cursive. The fourth was drawn in the photo-realist style of a pulp detective novel, angry capitals and an empty metal trapeze in a spotlight. Then Karl swiped forwards and yelped. The image was a photograph of a rabbit’s head, skinless, red musculature and pink eyes protruding. He picked up the tablet again and swiped forward, but that was the last image.

  T. Piven’s The Trapeze is a notorious hoax in the occult book world. It was rumoured to have existed as an anonymous text alongside a popular exegesis of the Quadriga, the specific covine-type of the Crooked Path. There is no record of the text’s existence, but numerous books have been written by forgers based on what little is known of the skeleton plot. It is said to be an account of obedience, control, of binding another to yourself, taking the metaphor of the trapeze artist as its central motif, and the unshakeable trust involved. A novel, a manual, an incantation, it takes the form of a Bildungsroman in which Bilyana, a young Bulgarian woman, is on the run from

  The text ended there. Karl checked the source for the page and saw that there was a regular deletion, every fifteen minutes in fact, from a user named ‘Tpivaen41’. Karl stayed on the page to see if he could catch any text before it was deleted, but got bored and went back to his Bad Mice essay.

  Saturday passed in much the same way. Karl finished the third-year student’s paper and concluded that the cradle, intentionally a fake for the doll’s house, but reappropriated by the mice as an actual cradle for their baby mice to sleep in, was the only significant item the mice are able to carry over the threshold of fantasy/reality, likening it to an amulet in a fantasy story which keeps its power even after the user wakes up. He quoted some Žižek. Genevieve said several sentences in Italian and Karl said ‘Wow.’

  Everything, in fact, was fine until the evening meal.

  Retrieving the salad tongs Genevieve had let fall from the bowl as she passed it, Janna said, ‘Clumsy.’

  Genevieve raised her eyebrows and said she was sorry.

  ‘I was looking,’ said Janna, ‘for my passport earlier. I have to go to Germany overnight tomorrow. Have you seen it?’

  ‘No,’ said Genevieve.

  ‘Someone keeps tidying things away,’ said Janna.

  ‘I had a housemate who did that,’ said Genevieve. ‘She’d gather up everyone’s things in every room – wallets, important letters, essays, shoes, phones, car keys – and she’d shove them in a box or a drawer or something, and then she’d just literally strew her own stuff all over the house.’

  Genevieve’s expansive hand gesture sent her glass of red wine across the table where most of it splashed over Janna’s expensive-looking cream off-the-shoulder jumper and the rest spilled over the end of the table into her lap.

  ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry,’ said Genevieve.

&nb
sp; ‘It’s all right,’ said Stu, scraping his chair back. ‘I’m getting towels.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Janna walked to the kitchen, pulling off her jumper. Karl stared at her back, the thin black straps of her bra. They heard her say, ‘Don’t do that,’ to Stu.

  Genevieve was sitting low in her chair, childlike.

  ‘It was an accident,’ said Karl, quietly, concerned at how annoyed Janna seemed to be. ‘Don’t worry.’

  Janna came back into the dining room buttoning a black shirt. Stu followed with a dishcloth, mopped up the wine from the table and Janna’s chair before they both sat down again.

  ‘Where were we?’ said Stu.

  ‘Genevieve, darling, don’t look so upset,’ said Janna. ‘It’s a fucking jumper.’

  ‘I’m just so sorry,’ said Genevieve. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

  Janna picked up her full glass of iced water and casually threw the contents at Genevieve’s chest.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Stu.

  ‘Well, now we’re even,’ said Janna.

  Karl watched Genevieve’s chest rise and fall as her expression of shock resolved into a smile.

  ‘You bitch,’ she said, beaming at Janna.

  ‘Come on,’ Janna took her hand. ‘I’ve got a hundred outfits you’d look beautiful in.’

  22

  WEEK THREE INVOLVED a focus on relationships. Janna gave her standard speech about trying to get something positive out of the experience, even if they felt like resisting it, even if it felt demeaning. Dedicating your life to someone else was about as big a commitment as you could make in your mortal tenure and, like anything else, it was beneficial to … It’s fine, they told her.

  Karl was to spend evenings with Janna, and Genevieve with Stu. The moment this was announced, Stu took Genevieve out of the house, leaving Karl with a glass of vitamin juice and Janna, who had put on a pair of spectacles and produced a pen and paper and a digital recorder.