by Luke Kennard
After five minutes Genevieve looked at him incredulously and said, ‘Why are you crying?’
Karl shook his head and gripped the steering wheel.
‘Do you want this to stop?’ said Genevieve, after a while.
‘Yes,’ he said, softly, ‘yes, I want it to stop.’
This was how it went. You felt you’d achieved some kind of catharsis, the point at which an argument should be over.
‘I’m going to start telling my aunt about the things you say to me,’ said Genevieve, tearfully. ‘She never liked you.’
Karl parked wonkily in the bay. Genevieve was out of the car before he could pull the handbrake. He opened the door to yell, ‘Where are you going?’ and watched her disappear through the automatic door.
In the service station Karl leaned against the wall between the Noddy car and the 50p massage chair. A little girl climbed into the Noddy car and said, fix it, Mummy, fix it. Her mother sighed, and went through her bag for change. Karl smiled at her. Amidst the throng of families and couples heading to the coffee, chicken and pizza franchises a separate stream of women emerged from the toilets, exchanging wide-eyed glances. For God’s sake. Karl swallowed a sudden absence of saliva and marched towards the Ladies, holding the door for a smart, white-haired woman who wore an expression of detached amusement, before walking through himself.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, before the concerned murmurs began. ‘I’m sorry.’
He could hear Genevieve weeping hysterically between bouts of deep breathing.
‘She’s with me. I’m really sorry.’
The toilets were so busy and the noise of constant flushing and the taps running and the banks of hand-dryers so dominant that it was impossible to explain himself to the occupants before they got replaced by the next wave: tutting, some laughter, ironic screams. Karl had to accept that as long as he was in the toilets he was to be treated with distrust and incredulity. Only one woman, younger than him, her hair dyed pink, who had washed her hands and dried them, stayed long enough to talk and Karl did his best to ignore her.
‘What’s going on?’ she said.
Genevieve wailed from the cubicle.
‘She’s not well.’
‘She doesn’t sound sick,’ said the woman. ‘She sounds terrified.’
Karl knocked on the fourth grey stall door. Genevieve didn’t react or break her keening.
‘Genevieve, it’s me, I’m sorry. Please come out.’
He knocked again. Then he kicked the door.
‘What is he doing?’ said someone who had just entered the room.
‘Don’t do that,’ said the young woman with pink hair. ‘Jesus.’
‘What the actual fuck?’
Women gathered around him.
‘I’m really sorry about this,’ said Karl.
The door must have been half broken already because with the third kick the lock came loose and the door swung inwards. Genevieve was sitting on the lid of the toilet, using a paper sanitary disposal bag to breathe into. Even this irritated Karl. Breathing into a paper bag. Like a cartoon character. Genevieve took the bag away from her mouth and looked at him in disbelief.
‘Leave me alone!’ she shrieked.
‘I think you need to get out,’ the woman with pink hair said to him. She turned to Genevieve. ‘Do you want me to call the police. Or security? I can call security.’
‘This isn’t what it looks like,’ said Karl.
‘I don’t know what it looks like,’ said the woman, ‘but I think you should leave.’
She entered the cubicle and put her hand on Genevieve’s shoulder.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Karl.
‘Please,’ said Genevieve. ‘Just get him out of here.’
‘Oh, my God, baby,’ said Karl. ‘Why are you doing this? This is about nothing. It’s literally about nothing.’
‘Please,’ said Genevieve, looking at the woman, who took Karl’s arm and squeezed it hard.
‘Come on.’
‘I’ll see you outside, then,’ said Karl, aware that his voice sounded spiteful.
‘Just go,’ said Genevieve.
It took ten slow minutes for Genevieve to emerge, arm in arm with a tall, businesslike woman who had the air of having seen this before.
‘This him?’
Genevieve nodded and sniffled.
‘You’re with her?’
‘Yes,’ said Karl and was about to try to explain something, anything, to the woman who had successfully extracted Genevieve from the cubicle, but before he could form a sentence she just said, ‘All righty then,’ and walked away. All righty then.
Karl tried to take Genevieve’s hand but she snatched it away and walked with her hands behind her back.
‘Can we just …’ said Karl. But the moment they were through the automatic doors Genevieve bolted again.
‘Genevieve!’
She ran across the car park, away from their car, past the Travelodge and towards the entrance to the motorway. It was sheeting with rain. Karl gave chase, but Genevieve seemed to have developed an extraordinary speed and his breathing soon became ragged. He could taste blood.
‘Lord Jesus Christ,’ said Karl, between breaths, ‘Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ As a teenager Karl was so obsessed with Salinger’s Franny and Zooey he had sought out a copy of The Way of a Pilgrim, the book Franny is obsessed with in the novel. He found it a bit mawkish. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,’ he said.
He chased Genevieve around the landscaped hillock where drivers let their dogs shit. She hadn’t looked back once. She was heading towards the roundabout. He was still a little way behind her and before he rounded the corner he heard a screech of brakes and a long, incredulous blare. He ran, he spat rain, wiped rain out of his eyes. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
Genevieve was darting left and right in the hard shoulder as if she meant to cross six lanes of motorway.
‘Genevieve!’
The memory of a hundred miserable PE lessons returned to him: being taught to play rugby in the suburban drizzle, gooseflesh and knee-length maroon socks, the excremental smell of the clay; a small, hairless child against boys who seemed, improbably, to have already gone through puberty. He sprinted from the exit ramp, flew at Genevieve, grabbed her around the waist and slammed his head into her arse: a perfect tackle into the scrubby earth past the cat’s eyes. A 16-wheeler rumbled by. They rolled over, Genevieve on top of him, her head tucked into his neck. They hadn’t even hugged one another in weeks and Karl realised, with dismay, that he had an erection. What is wrong with you? He hoped she couldn’t tell. He could feel her body convulsing with sobs, which subsided against the background of furious traffic, rain-slick wheels, chanting engines. He was about to say something, but stopped. He put his hand in her soaked hair.
She was asleep.
‘I love you,’ he said.
Lying on his bed, Karl couldn’t be sure if he’d really said I love you at the time or if he’d just picked her up and staggered back to the dented little Punto in silence. He loved her, he was sure of that, and he thought he was long over the silly incident in the service station. But sometimes it returned and made him so cross he would clear his throat with a kind of anguished growl, or, if he was alone, punch the wall. On those occasions it seemed that it had just happened, or that it was in the process of happening, or that it was bound to happen again, and that it was more exasperating than he could reasonably be expected to cope with.
24
THE NEXT MORNING Genevieve looked very pale and, after responding to a couple of questions with a low wince, she ran to the en suite to throw up. While she straightened her hair he blew his nose with a loud, gnu-like honk and asked if he could call in sick for her. She told him she was used to it.
‘Today we’re going to be learning about volume!’ she said into the mirror, beaming like a childr
en’s TV presenter.
‘As in sound or space?’
Genevieve didn’t answer him. She was putting in her grandmother’s amber earrings.
‘Well, if you’re sure,’ said Karl. ‘So what the hell happened last night? I haven’t seen you since the vicar.’
‘The what?’
‘He said you left with Stu.’
‘Oh God, his friend’s a rum dealer or something. He had a suitcase full of rare and terrible rums. Guy’s a rep for The Transition from Holland. He offered me a job. He was pissed, but he meant it. I said I was studying Italian and he said in that case he could get me a job in Italy. And I said, I’d have to check with my husband and he just looked at the floor and shook his head and went boh, boh, boh, boh, boh.’
‘You could have called me.’
‘You were flirting with a schoolgirl.’
‘I was not.’
‘I thought I’d leave you to it.’
‘You barely spoke to me the whole night.’
‘Sorry.’
‘And Janna? Was she in on the rum tasting?’
‘I don’t think I saw Janna at all.’
‘Me neither. I figured you were having a private party without me. Pax?’
Genevieve curled her little finger around his.
‘Pax.’
‘Were you in the basement?’
‘Was I where?’
‘Did they take you to the basement?’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Genevieve. ‘There was an altar, which was actually just three big Cuban guys kneeling in a row, and they sacrificed me on it. We were in the garage, Karl.’
A crisp new Guardian and Telegraph lay at the mouth of the attic. Karl tucked them behind the wardrobe. He saw his wife out – she flinched when he went to kiss her goodbye and accepted a kiss on the cheek. Karl put his head in the living room expecting chaos but the place was immaculate, as if the party had never happened. Only several standing crates of sparkling clean glasses in the kitchen served as proof.
He felt like hot chocolate – something to line his stomach. Karl poured milk into Genevieve’s bird-print mug and decanted it into a small pan. He noticed something, as the gas caught: tucked hastily between a bottle of olive oil and a tin of paprika he saw the laminated bible-thick volume of The Transition: Mentor’s Edition. He opened it up in the middle. A block of prose, numbered 178:
The writer is on her deathbed. Her best friend since childhood is at her side. They used to jump into the lake together, holding hands. She asks her, her voice failing, she asks her, Do you have all of my writings? All of them, says her friend. Do you have all of the poems? she asks. Yes, says her friend. We have all of your poems. Do you have all of the short stories and essays? she asks. Yes, we have all of your short stories and essays. We have them tied in bundles in two tea chests. And the works in progress? she asks. Yes. We have all the works in progress and your letters and your journals, says her friend. Burn it, she says. Burn it all. You don’t mean that, her friend says. And the writer grabs her by the wrist, using every ounce of energy she has left, digging her nails between the tendons so that her friend cries out and looks right into her eyes, which are wide and crazy, like she’s horrified by what she’s looking at, and she says, her last words, she says, Burn it all. After the funeral her friend drags the two tea chests down to the furnace one by one. She places the first bundle – a sequence of poems and drafts about Leda and the Swan – in the grate and it catches fire. She nudges it with the poker, but it smoulders and barely moves. There’s a lot of smoke. She coughs. She looks at the two tea chests. She realises this is going to take a while.
Karl listened to the usually inaudible station clock snicker through a few seconds. The milk was beginning to steam. He scattered a spoonful of drinking chocolate into the pan and watched it film out onto the too cool surface. He turned to another page. Another block of prose, numbered 293:
It was my fiftieth birthday and I drank a bottle of beer with the chancellor. He had two bottles of beer in his desk. Warm, but it tasted heavenly. I commented on this and he reminded me that it was the first thing to pass my lips in forty-eight hours. We were that focused. Your body is so grateful, he said, it’s giving you a gift in return.
I took the Bentley back to the suburbs.
At home I found my six-year-old son holding a funeral for his favourite teddy bear. He was weeping and would not be comforted. The little bear was lying, face up, on a cardboard altar. My son had placed a strip of towelling over his eyes.
‘What are you talking about?’ my wife said, and her voice suggested that she was approaching the end of her tether. ‘He isn’t dead. Mr Waffles isn’t dead.’
My son was inconsolable. He died, he insisted. Mr Waffles got ill and died.
‘This isn’t right,’ I said. ‘Why do you think Mr Waffles is dead?’
Just look at him, my son maintained.
We buried the bear.
He turned to the last page – it seemed like a good place to check. He didn’t know how long it would be before Janna or Stu came into the kitchen, and he had a talismanic obsession with final pages. At school he would near a book’s conclusion, whether it was pulp science fiction or The Return of the Native with one hand firmly clamped over the ultimate paragraph, in case his eye lit on a single word which might rob the entire story of its point, spoil the answer to the riddle of why he was reading it. When he shared this with Genevieve she admitted to him that she always started a book by reading its final page, that she still did, but wasn’t sure why. He flipped through the back pages and found a table of small-print figures and percentage charts, adjacent to an advert for a property developer called Tern and Doughty: Creating a New World One Street at a Time.
Karl flicked through the Mentor’s Edition. As far as he could tell it was nothing but inscrutable prose poems, numbered 0 to 400. He opened an early one. 11:
The Popular Teacher. As with addiction programmes, you must presuppose a level of cynicism. Your protégés will feel superior to the programme, will resent most direct advice. The truth of the matter is that they blame anyone but themselves for their shortcomings and they are not ready for the humility of self-knowledge. Working with this attitude is a delicate business, and they must feel that you are on their side, working the programme even though you all know it to be foolish. As well as the authority, you must be the jester who makes the hypocrisy and capriciousness of courtly life palatable; the popular teacher who mocks the education system but gets everyone straight As in their exams. Stress the end results, ridicule the means, insisting on them with a world-weary …
Eleven was an odd number, just like the others, but it was also a prime number. Karl knew the prime numbers up to a hundred from a foundation course in mathematics he had taken when he first had aspirations to learn to code. He flicked through to 67:
The Salvage Yard. It may well be that one of your protégés outshines the other from the outset, and it is always worth bearing in mind that the vast majority of couples have come to you through the malpractice of one, not both. You will have to use your judgement here; assess the relationship with a clear eye. Is it toxic? Are there elements of Epistemological Abuse? Test, gently at first, their commitment to one another. In extreme cases …
‘Karl?’ Janna’s voice from the hallway. He hadn’t heard the door. He held his breath and pushed The Transition: Mentor’s Edition back towards the spice rack. His breath still held, he sprinkled more drinking chocolate into the milk, which was starting to simmer.
‘Hi, Janna.’
‘I wanted to apologise.’
‘You? For what?’
‘For the party. For leaving you alone like that.’
‘It’s nothing. I had fun,’ said Karl. ‘You have some fun friends.’
‘I had a bit of a turn. The pills. I hope you were okay.’
‘I was fine.’
‘I haven’t told Stu,’ she said. ‘About the massage or the writing or anything.’
‘I hadn’t thought about it. Are you okay? You sound …’
‘Are you scared of him?’
‘He hasn’t given me any reason to be.’
‘But you’re relieved I’m not going to tell him?’
‘I suppose I must be a bit scared of him,’ said Karl.
‘It’s important to me,’ said Janna, ‘that you like me.’
‘Of course I like you.’
She hugged him. He put his hands on the small of her back and they stood that way until Karl smelled the milk burning.
25
THE NEXT MORNING buzzed with Stu’s weed strimmer before Genevieve’s alarm went off. Karl had to meet his accountant at lunchtime and offered to walk her to work, even though the extra hours in bed after Genevieve left at seven were among his profoundest sensory pleasures.
‘Well, aren’t you sweet?’ she said. ‘Are you going to wear your weddings and funerals suit?’
‘It’s just Keston,’ said Karl, pulling a twenty-year-old Pavement T-shirt over his head. ‘I don’t need to impress him.’
‘But you’re going to his office.’
‘It’s Keston.’
Genevieve often said that Keston was an idiot, but she said it as if she was talking about a lovable older brother of whom she ultimately approved.
‘Do you remember,’ she said, as they left Janna and Stu’s road, ‘when we had pasta at his flat that time and there was a number on his wooden spoon?’
‘No. What number?’
‘Twelve. He asked me to stir the sauce and there was a number drawn on the spoon in felt tip.’
‘Why do you remember this? What does that mean?’
‘Oh, Karl,’ said Genevieve, barging him with her hip so that he stepped off the pavement. ‘Master’s in Metaphysical Poetry and he has all the observational prowess of a syllabub. It means he swiped his wooden spoon from a pub – a table marker. He’s a man who won’t spend ninety-nine pence on a kitchen utensil if he doesn’t have to. That’s the kind of person you want as your accountant.’