I wrap badly, as a preference, and avoid presents when I can. They are sad.
Me too, at the moment—which is ridiculous. All I’ve done is spend some time in Hungary and come back again, no harm done. I and whoever was with me will have parted as good friends. I won’t take more of Virginas’s money than I need and I’ll cut up the card to stop anyone else from using it after me. I have my health, basically, much of the time. There is no current cause for gloom, or maudlin recollections of the family home and how handy my mother might have been with fancy paper and adhesive tape. She enjoyed giving stuff to people, still does, and that’s fine—I have to let others like what they like, I really do, it’s a character flaw of mine, this urge to disapprove of pleasures I can’t share.
The best move I can make is to have a shower: nothing like external liquid to calm and soothe. There might even be a change of clothing in my bag, although it doesn’t appear too promising in that direction.
No, I’m in luck—a fresh T-shirt that’s tightly folded in an unused way and, three, four pairs of knickers left in my little clean underwear sack. Which is odd—I usually only take what I’m going to need. Maybe I left Budapest four pairs early. I’m sure I had my reasons.
The bathroom here does not invite nudity. The blue textured floor feels impossible to clean effectively and the available fixtures and fittings are all formed out of beige-coloured plastic in an effort to pre-empt yellowing and staining by choosing a shade which makes everything look both stained and yellow from the start. The sink’s edge is marked with round, tarry burns and the signs of a tumbling slide made by at least one lighted cigarette as it dropped into the basin. The shower—there is no bath—seeks to suggest the possibilities of bathing by building a dangerous, high lip up around its stall. Small or desperate people could crouch in the square box this forms, avoiding the discomfort of the central drain, and pretend they were curled in a tiny Jacuzzi—small or desperate mad people, anyway.
But the water is fine, pretty much the heat I like and stroking over the forehead gently, I have no complaints. Other than a sting in one shoulder—I must have scraped myself there, fallen against something. My knees are bruised, too, but not badly. Soft skin runs in our family, we are easy to damage, on the surface at least, but also quick to heal. On the surface at least. No, we’re resilient, honestly. I’m healing right now, if I think about it, rebuilding whatever is amiss.
I don’t even mind that the soap smells of dog, or that the drain is looking nastily clogged. That’s really—it’s not what you’d want near your feet—a grubby, perforated plate that’s matted with hairs which are clearly not mine, clearly moving in the flow of water, reddish yellow, some of them definitely pubic, others more wispy: wispy would be the only word to describe them.
The only word to make the shower curtain crawl along my side and cling, the only word to make the water blind me, the only word to show me elbowing open my bedroom door in the grey stumble of last night, last early morning and Wispy trying open-mouthed kisses and missing, thumping like a wet, cupped hand against my chin, my cheek—I am already ducking him, but I am also still letting him in and seeing his damp struggle out of his jacket and his shirt and he can’t take off the ginger hair across his stomach, that’s part of him—we’re down to him now, down all the way. Although he’s shy next, turning his back for the shoes and socks, trousers, the coy slip down of the underpants, bending over fast but not fast enough to deny me that glimpse of his scrotum, strangled red, the sad hang of it like a perineal suicide between the stringy thighs. And into bed he scrambles, only facing me once he’s under the covers—sparing me any view of him from the front—staring now, all married fright and want and disbelief that he’s in luck.
I join him and disbelieve it also. I am not myself. I am watching from above as if I were in a pleasant coma, or improperly anaesthetised, just drifting off safely somewhere near to death, not here.
And then Well. Hm. Goodness . . . Blow me. And, being someone else and absent, I do.
I did.
I really did.
If I go through and inspect the sheet now, I’ll find more of him, more hair, and the other usual indications. I don’t think I’ll bother, though. I’ll stay under the shower a while longer and scrub the way he must have done, meticulously removing what his wife shouldn’t find and working out the story to tell her if she’s still awake when he reaches her room— that he stayed late in the bar, that she was asleep when he came in, dead to the world, and he’s newly back from the bathroom, that’s all, nowhere else, she only dreamed he was undressing, sorry to disturb her, night-night.
I told you I didn’t like presents and this is why. When I have a need that isn’t thirsty, I never know the way to make it stop. I give myself unsuitable remedies, bad distractions, and that’s how I end up remembering, time after time, that I do very much disapprove of pleasures I can’t share.
Funny, this is the kind of thing traditionally thought to make one abstemious. Sober, it could be argued, I would not have had sex with a man who had the IQ of a table and a body that would be funny if I couldn’t remember it, hadn’t touched it, hadn’t known it touching me, my privacy. Sober, nothing unamusing need have happened.
It’s a persuasive hypothesis—it just doesn’t persuade me. I feel grisly because I have done something grisly, not because of drink. But if I now go down to the bar I can have another drink and that will make me feel not grisly at all, I can guarantee. People who do not drink correctly cannot understand. They can only whine on about what a torment— having to drink, really needing to drink, how awful. I am much more clear-headed, because I have studied the matter long and hard and have realised—my condition does indeed mean that I’m ruined without drink and yet, equally, drink will save me from all of my ruinations: those it inspires and every single other trouble, large and small. It keeps me free. That isn’t a torment, it’s a gift. It is my one and perfect gift.
It assures me this morning that once I’ve scraped myself thoroughly clean I can go downstairs and melt my unease down to a whisper within half a gill. And it’s not even Mr. Wispy that’s upsetting me, in any case. I’m mildly troubled because, for some reason, I keep hearing my younger voice ask my mother why she couldn’t give flowers: they would be cheap out of the garden, and—although I don’t say this—they would be normal, a present that people would expect.
But she never did like to give her flowers away, they were far too important. Only my father, on his birthday, would find a bouquet of freshly slaughtered blooms at the dinner table, killed for him: my mother’s eyes soft as she looked from the vase to his mouth, his eyes. They didn’t talk much on those evenings and they would seem, I believed, both proud of themselves and secretive, their hands brushing whenever they thought that Simon and I couldn’t see. I’m sure they are much the same now, but without us to watch them and stunt their tenderness.
And I would like to cry as I think of this, although I won’t—not because of my parents, or last night, or even drink—it’s because I want somebody I can give flowers to, someone here with me, for me.
I am in a photograph. I’m aware both of the camera and of the new friends that I have to either side and I am keeping myself in check. But I am also smiling. We are all smiling: all together at a table which runs level with the bottom of the frame, carries a mess of glasses, spills and ashtrays to clutter in between it and the lens. The state of the table suggests that we’ve been here for a while, because we have, and now we’re staying, permanent. Our hands are stilled by the shutter, held as smirs of light, fixed where they rest against jacket sleeves, cheeks, thin air, or caught illustrating words that have escaped us. In the background, a friend that I don’t know has started to walk across. I keep smiling.
Actually, I’m in quite a lot of photographs, but this is the only one I carry with me. It shows the end of a pre-wedding dinner for somebody’s brother, the brother of a distant friend, more an acquaintance. Already, there have been tiny cousins,
running about until shouted at, and a range of slightly tearful older ladies, to whom I have not spoken despite ingenious opening gambits on their part. The food has been vaguely harassed— an effort at Jewish traditional: chopped up eggs and bland chicken livers, clear soup, that kind of thing—but the restaurant was improvising, I think: intense conversations with management taking place before each course, and most people not even caring, being either not traditional, or not Jewish.
Throughout the dinner I have drunk water, having been warned that a semi-serious, putatively kosher, dinner would only offer drinking matter in amounts that would act as an unfulfilling tease. But then comes the final set-menu choice between ice cream and cake and I choose the latter, my first mouthful unleashing a rabbit punch of spirit and the smell of a cheap, hard brandy, impatient after impregnating raisins for so long. I can tell it’s been expecting me—which is the kind of thing to make anyone want to play.
So, having the taste of a better evening kissed in tight behind our teeth, a number of us, cake-eaters to a man, move through to the bar and the table—the gloss of its surface lying beneath our elbows like a tidy pond, busy with our reflections, our liquid selves. And here we are forever, being happy about our good company, or its immanent relaxation, or even the thought of someone else’s marriage, hopeful and far off.
I am pictured beside a man who has recently told me that hypnotising dogs is very easy: you stare at them calmly and close your eyes for longer and longer periods until they start to echo you, believe in you, and then gradually fall asleep. Cats are much more wary and tend to call your bluff. I already know this and am slightly bored, but the man is smiling and I am smiling, too, and we give every appearance of having reached some happy agreement just as the iris opens and bares the film.
The smiles are why I keep the picture. They are evidence. You see, there are many types of smile. Everyone is familiar with the insincere screwyoureally sort, the I’mdyingbutkeepingitin, the thinkingofsome- thingelseentirely, the JesusI’mscaredandIhaven’tacluewhatmyfaceisupto— any expression can imply any emotion, that’s something everybody understands. But there is a special smile also, one that can be neither prepared, nor simulated, and which convinces me completely of God’s essential benevolence: it has the effect of unquestioning, undiluted love and is entirely beautiful.
Let me put this another way: people will tell you that angels watch over idiots and children, so that no one does them any harm. Well, how many people want to do them harm? They are at least unthreatening, if not attractive, they are obviously large-eyed and weak and soaking with confidence in strangers: only a maniac would think of abusing their faith. But the drinkers: who’ll watch over them? When they are late beyond imagining on the one night which is inexcusable, when they have stolen from you and then blamed you for the theft, when they have broken and dirtied and laughed at whatever especially personal treasures you care about, when they have lied and bullied and tricked and then wept before you can start to, when they have taken even that, when they have relied on the irreversible stupidity of your love, when they have just forgotten you exist—what is it that prevents you killing them? Only this, their smile.
Occasionally, I’ll admit, a drinker will meet an unpleasant end, but if logic and justice had their way, this would happen constantly. Murder shouldn’t be the exception, it should be the rule. We do terrible things—I don’t personally—but some of us are unthinkable, grotesque and punishment is the least that we deserve. Still, when we drink and act as the structure of our characters leads us to, we go almost universally unscathed. We study to move like wirewalkers, all mesmerising tensions and hot sweat, we cut away our languages, our names, and in return for this tiny effort we are given our wonderful smile and it protects us, because God is on our side. He left word to that effect in the Bible. Surprising this, I realise, but I have known my Bible well for many years and it’s all there: we are His favourites.
How did I come to discover this? The Gideon man paid a visit to my school when I was fifteen, maybe sixteen, a fraction less than half a life ago. The whole school was summoned into assembly—my brother towards the front among the younger classes—where the Gideon man held up a cheap, red-bound edition of the New Testament, held it as if it were liable to sting, and said that he would give a copy to each of us. He hinted we might not read it and expressed brisk doubts that any of us would manage a whole Bible, even if he had one to hand: not chewing it down and digesting it, wearing it out, in the way that the Gideon’s founder had when he was much younger than us. The Gideon’s founder had done nothing but read the Bible from the age when he first began to puzzle letters out, hundreds and hundreds of times he’d read it—or a tale to that effect, I wasn’t listening, I was already deciding that I would read the red New Testament and then the full, fat Bible after that. I was going to read it more than once, because no one should ever be able to say there were things I couldn’t do.
Which is how I learned that Isaac chose Rebecca to be his wife because she offered him a drink and Gideon—the warrior, not the book-pusher—was ordered by God to pick his troops according to the way they drank: no ducking in the head and guzzling blindly: watchful drinkers, those are the ones the Lord prefers. Who better than God to know that any wise drinker should always be on guard? These were matters concerning water, of course, but you know what water ends up turning into—like father, like son.
Obviously, for almost the whole of my senior school life I wasn’t exactly legal for wine: as it happens, I didn’t much like it, anyway—still don’t. My inclinations then leaned towards sweet cider and the kind of sticky sherry you might buy for an elderly aunt—which made it quite easy to purchase as an innocent, young lass—now what’s the brand that Auntie said she favoured?—limpid-eyed and dressed in my uniform—do you have a larger bottle?—she likes it a lot—I could have requested mescaline and got it, because I knew how to ask. Never disguise what you are when you can be open, when you can be disarming, when you can smile.
Smile in the way that you might as a precaution while you’re leaving a hotel, sliding along beside the cover of the checkout queue and then lolloping softly off with your friendly holdall towards the plain door that looks like a fire exit, but has no alarm and opens without complaint on to naked concrete stairs, descending. This is a guess, an inspiration, brought on by a reflective afternoon spent watching a poker championship on the lounge bar’s cable TV and considering M. H. Virginas’s credit card. You could become apprehensive thinking of items like that and apprehension is well on the way to fear and fear is bad for you, shortens your life, any normal individual would avoid it.
This means that you are justified in leaving now, a day early, without troubling yourself, or anyone else, over paperwork and payment. It is reasonable for you never to consider going back, pausing only briefly at the foot of the stairs, then leaning through another door and walking down what you find to be an underground passage between cupboards and boilers, ventilators, tanks, and a small room with a dartboard and a fridge and a thickening of old cigarette smoke around a woman in a pink overall. She looks at you, at your friendly holdall and at your eyes, and it is simply and beautifully clear that you are leaving, are running away, and it is equally plain that she knows this.
Internally, several areas of your body have clenched or shivered defensively, but outside you can feel yourself start smiling. She has wonderful hair, this woman, a marvellous tumble of coppery grey, and a face of some significance—a face you’d want to vote for, or see on a postage stamp—and you concentrate on this and on her other impressive qualities and, although they are not clear, you do still love them: you care for them and empathise and you are deeply aware of your shared humanity: and this wealth of fellow feeling and every other subtle elaboration of your heart—it all finds its ideal expression in your smile. The smile allows her to both understand and absolve you simultaneously, which is a special, spiritual pleasure for anyone. So next she leans her head a degree or two to the side
, breathes out audibly and then glances back down at her paper, as if you had never been. She turns her page.
You make it to a corner, round it, and then a real fire exit is waiting for you, propped open by a plastic chair that stands empty, half in sunlight. There is no difficulty to leaving, no tricks or last-minute shouts. It is simple to cross the car park, kicking between a grey hedge of low shrubs and on into another car park and then to a pavement and traffic and everyday life.
In the photograph, I can see I have that fire-exit smile: it is there and ready for the camera, as if it wants to be on the record, for once. And I can see that the man beside me shares precisely my expression, equally absolving and untouchable and tenderly alight. We are the only ones: any observer would quickly pick us out and say we are alike.
I saved the picture because of this and because it reminds me that even a person who has the drinker’s smile is not immune from someone else who has it, too.
II
He’s called Robert.
But I am terrible with names, constantly losing my grip on them when I shouldn’t, so I’m shoving a handy sentence round and round, behind my thoughts—His name is Robert, Robert Gardener, as if he digs things up: his name is Robert, that’s his name—I am concentrating on this hard enough to find conversation tricky.
Not that anyone is talking to me, right now. I am leaning my chin against the top of a whitewashed wall and looking across at a sand track, looping and glowing up under lights. The electric hare whines past me, sounding like every anxiety I’ve ever had, and triggering the flip of the dog traps, the start of their gangly, pelting run. Greyhound paws on sand: they make a remarkable noise, very soothing and quietly festive. Astride the wall to my left, a fat boy in a shellsuit giddy-ups the bricks with his heels, but seems to have no interest in any particular dog.
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