“But it’s your job, though, darling.”
“Which is why I hate my job.”
“Look, look . . .” I’m not in firm enough form to stand being melancholy and there’s nobody sadder than a gin drunk, no point talking to them at all, so I have to keep Robert back from complete immersion. “How about if we think of . . .” my skull is beginning to weigh a great deal, “distracting things.”
We all need distractions, they make us laugh. And your options in life distil down to no more than this: laugh or cry, cry or laugh. Quickly, or slowly, it doesn’t matter which—you will discover the dreadful and unfunny joke that you are, that we all are. And this condition is insoluble, incurably permanent, no one has ever been able to do a thing about it, but you still have to stay here and occupy your time. So either you can seek out distractions, or else you can worry until you’re too senile to understand why: laugh or cry.
“Radio Four.”
“Hm?” Dapper and quick, another dose of gin is filling Robert’s glass, too far away. “Radio Four is shite.”
“Not the Shipping Forecast. Not all that ‘North Utsire, South Utsire, variable three or four, good.’ And when you hear good you’re sure it is really, totally good—that’s built into the voice.”
In this I do truly believe—the restorative powers of the Shipping Forecast. It’s late and you’re scared and out of luck and everything could be terrible, but it’s not, because responsible people are keeping watch over your coast and there is order far beyond you in this marvellous, lapping ring and there is still “rain in West later” and still Malin and still Hebrides and still Dogger, Fisher, German Bight. “Go on, you know it’s nice.”
“They’ve changed it—the place names are all different. I don’t see how, I mean it’s still the same island. They do that kind of thing—change it all till it’s shit and they don’t even ask.”
“Well, then the way it was: the way you remember. Or . . . or there’s . . .” I am not currently filled with handy signposts to the bright side, but I’m making my best attempt. “Steve Martin juggling . . . that’s . . . he never looks as if he can, you know? His hands seem too slow and his feet seem too big and you think that he’s going to fall over, come apart somehow, that he’s too young to be doing something so complicated, but then he’s fine, absolutely fine—in fact, he’s fucking flying. There’s nothing about him clumsy, and he’s not young, not any more—only something’s untouched in him, the way you hope could be possible for you—and he looks like a total idiot, but he isn’t that either, in no sense, so you can feel optimistic, because you look a total idiot yourself . . . I mean . . . in fact, anyone funny, anyone who takes away the pain, you’ve got to be happy they’re there, that they exist.” A beat during which he breathes dully, no reaction. “Haven’t you?”
“What about the comedians that aren’t funny?”
“If they’re not funny, then they’re not comedians. Don’t be confusing. I mean the proper ones, the ones who stop you wanting to kill yourself. Robert . . . I mean . . . why not think of the good funny people . . . ?”
“I suppose.”
“They’re a good distraction. I mean the North Utsire, South Utsire type of good.”
“I suppose.”
“Then you try to think of another—I’m fucking exhausted.”
And I listen to him smile now, finally, the definite sound of a smile. “All right.” An easier sigh. “John Mills. Yeah . . . him. Everything about him. Every thoroughbred, fucking inch. That’s a film star—John Mills.”
And, obviously, this is true—and I know what he’s going to say next, so I get there first, to keep him company. “Of course, John Mills—John Mills and the lager.”
“Ice Cold in Alex and the way he drinks that lager.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Sand in his shoes and filthy and not quite believing in the bar— maybe he’s only thinking it very successfully so that it’s there—but right in front of him is that smooth, tall, icy, sexy, gorgeous, fucking lager.”
“Carlsberg, I believe.”
“Carlsberg in Alexandria. Oh, the wonders of modern life. Even then. Even with a war on.”
“And you know he’d have walked for it twice as far, walked himself blind and just kept on, crossed any desert you gave him: you know that he has the true want, that it could take him anywhere. He shows you all of that. Which is proper acting.”
“Genius.”
“Genius.”
“God bless him all his days.”
I have never heard Robert bless anyone before.
And we pause and, in two different cities, picture Mills and the black-and-white bar room with the shaded quiet and the ceiling fans and the barman who is courteous and attentive and understands gently and deeply exactly the things that you need. Together, we see the moment when Mills meets his lager, the tender pause before he strokes one finger through its sweat. We sympathise with his lips as they make their first touch.
“Genius.” Robert’s voice sounding much closer than before.
“Yes.”
“Your turn.”
“Oh . . . a three-minute egg when someone else has cooked it.”
“If you insist.” He doesn’t sound too impressed. “Do you do something interesting with the egg?”
“I’ll show you—the next time we’re both in the same room with an egg.” I’m trying to think of more people I like who’d be reasons for keeping chipper, but the only ones I can come up with are James Mason and Humphrey Bogart and Alastair Sim and a number of others, all strangers I’ve seen in films and long dead.
This might mean that I have no friends. Except I can’t believe that. It doesn’t seem likely.
“There’s something else that’s good, that’s great.”
“What?” I ask this although the nice solemnity in his pause makes it plain where we’re heading. I nudge him on, as I’m supposed to. “What’s good?”
It isn’t solely sex with Robert—he’s my friend. When I consider this seriously, the billowy feeling comes back behind my face and tickles. He makes me warmer, always.
And at the moment he’s also sipping gin, delaying his reply. “What’s good is being both in the same room. Being with you. Being with the hard skin on your heels and the place where your lower incisors are uneven and the mole at your hip, near the bone, and the way you don’t have any ear-lobes and—”
“I should work in a carnival sideshow. Thanks.”
“No.” The word slightly bewildered and sweet. “No. That’s the stuff I like, stuff I remember when you’re not here. Why are you not here?”
“I told you.”
“What did you tell me?”
“I’m not well.”
“Yes, but you sound better. You could come home now.”
“I haven’t got my clothes.”
“So you could come home now.”
“If we talk about this any more I’m going to get into trouble.”
“So I shouldn’t tell you that I want to suck your nipples and that the left one is a little bit more cute than the right, but I could be very affectionate to both of them, right now. I could be kissing your tits and then tuning them both into Radio Moscow, right now. There’s no end to the—”
“Robert. Please.” The side of my head twitching and the image of being discovered half undressed and having phone sex in a downstairs corridor by my brother, or—how much more delightful—my brother’s wife, is not inviting, but at the moment it isn’t quite not inviting enough. “I’m only ill—I’m not dead. If we start doing this, we’ll have to finish doing this.”
“Then come over here and finish with me.” His little boy voice back with me again, the naked one, the one that calls you in your bones.
“If I didn’t feel like shit and I could get my clothes and out of the house . . . I don’t have my car with me . . . it’s—Look, I will be there soon. And we can still rehearse, as a stopgap . . . since it happens we’re both awake.”
“Nope.”
“What?”
“No rehearsing, if you’re not here.”
“Robert.”
“Extra incentive—so you’ll get better quick. And I’ll need to go to sleep soon—I have to be up in . . . four hours. Not that I’m not up now.”
“And I could help you with that.”
“No, no. I’m going to ring off in a minute and go and have a wank. I could really do with one—a long, hard, detailed wank. Think about you and torment myself until I come . . . but you won’t want to listen to that, because you’re poorly and you’re too far away. So you sleep well, all right?”
“You fucker.”
“Mm-hmm. But not tonight. You sleep tight, love. See you soon.”
“Robert?”
“Mm?”
And a breath dashing in, unwieldy, before I can say, “I love you.”
“I love you, too. But I’m still hanging up. You get very well for me. Please. Night-night.”
There is something smug and puritanical in the small din from the line once he’s disconnected.
Having no alternatives, I scramble to my feet and shuffle through to Simon’s kitchen—where, it turns out, they don’t keep any booze. They also don’t keep it in the dining room, or the bathroom, or in what seems to be their mutual study. (How charming: even when they’re working-from-home, they can’t claw themselves apart.) The cold has sunk into me thoroughly by this time and I’ve started to tremble badly, which is distressing my eyes, but I manage to find the living room and—my angels are generous—dawdling there in the corner is the drinks cabinet I spent so much time with when I was young. My parents must have passed it on to their virtually teetotal son: perhaps as a wedding present, perhaps to save it wear and tear, to spare it from ever devolving down to me.
Simple oak, nicely understated and with a cheery sheen which would be visible if I could risk turning on a lamp: a little cupboard underneath for coasters and paper umbrellas, napkins, olives, nuts, the time-wasting inconveniences that amateur drinkers need; above this, an area for pouring, or for setting down a tray; above this, heaven, which is to say the pull-down door that opens in front of your face and releases the sharp, dark, intelligent reek of cloistered alcohol. The hinges creak in stereo, loud as a drawbridge, the way they always did, and the sound sets something leaping in me, up through the blood it flies—joy. Not the shy joy Mr. Russell tended, or the kind that I thought I’d grow up for, but mine, my joy: adjusting the world and defining the brain, instantaneous and available by the glass.
Except there’s nothing here.
Fuck.
No. Nothing.
I can smell where it’s been. I could lean in and lick the wood—but I wouldn’t catch more than a sherry stain, if that. This was all that I needed and they’ve stolen it.
I’m tired and cold and shaking and, as soon as it knows I can find no drink, the fear in the house funnels into the room around me, scuttling inside sounds I can’t decipher and racing the dark up, tense against my back. It moves under my ribs, climbing and falling, climbing and falling, like a spider against glass. And louder than anything there is the threat of being dry, trapped dry, alone with no one here but the incomplete me.
“Hannah?”
It is partly a relief to have a group of noises creep in close and then congeal into Gillian—the restrained and feminine disturbance of her arrival as she reaches the room, throws on the light and then walks up to deal with me. She does something in the social services, so dealing with people like me keeps her in work. Not that I expect her to be grateful.
“Looking for something, were we?”
The ominous first-person plural. And that fabulously knowing, sing-song delivery, I wonder if she intends to be quite so dangerously irritating. “Found it, did you? Oh dear, you can’t have. Because the cupboard is bare. ”
I pity her clients: combating such an Olympian intellect must depress them at every turn. Massive depression and frothing rage must, indeed, dominate their lives. And here she stands like a cartoon matron in her chin-to-ankle nightgown, and wanting me to think she hid the bottles when I know it was Simon. Most likely, he’s thrown out the coffee, as well—too stimulating. I might down a whole jar with a Brasso chaser and then run amok.
“What’s the matter, Hannah? No witty, little comments to make?”
If I did have any comments, I’d much rather waste them on her cats. “No. Going to bed now.”
“Oh, are you?” She breathes only from her shoulders up, I notice, everything very shallow and frenetic: carrying on like that must eventually damage your health. “Going to bed. Is that right?” This may be an attempt at sarcasm, it’s impossible to tell, and I’m well past caring.
“Have to . . . go to bed. Night.” Because she can say what she likes about me—I don’t have be here while she does and I want to be lying down and I want to be unconscious and if I close my eyes when it’s this late and I’m this tired—instantly this tired—the effort of listening to her making my skin itch—then surely I will sleep. I would strongly prefer to be asleep. Caught flat underneath the night, alone and alert and with no defences, I don’t deserve that. Sleeping is my one way out of here.
I drag myself past her, duvet trailing on the polished hardwood floor through no trace of visible dust. I wonder if she’s gladdened by my demonstration of her domestic proficiency and it may be she says something further to that effect, but I genuinely, physically can no longer hear a word.
I can’t do this.
No sleep, not practically any kind of rest, your night full of crawling, the presence of crawling, and dirty rags of something, the taste of rags, of death, and first the morning pouncing down alight and now leering through the windows of the car and coming in to get you, only a pinch of glass to keep it back, and so much of it in your surroundings because Simon is driving you, taking you out to the airport, no matter what you think.
I don’t want to go.
And he’s repeating about the money—the cost you didn’t ask them all to pay—and the reasons why they can’t afford it, the coming baby and its needs, the toll of the communal sacrifice. You didn’t want it, didn’t know about it, would have told them not to, but there it is, past recalling, such a monstrous sum spent and with nothing to show, because they have laid down a kind of bet on you, something unwieldy for you to carry with you on your trip to this clinic, this hospital, this spa, this holding tank you cannot visualise no matter what name it has. They think it might help you to go there and they have this love for you: this hard, immovable, weight of love they are levering down on to your breathing— Simon and Mrs. Simon and your parents and the child unborn—the five of them sending you off to win their bet and recover yourself, grow respectable and better until everyone can pretend that’s the way you were made.
So I won’t go then. I can decide.
But the countryside is rushing ahead of the car, faster than the windscreen, reckless, and sucking you on until you feel very sick and all the while you’re plunging downwards to the point where your family’s wishes are going to make you disappear.
Please.
To the place with the aeroplane smell—jet fuel and vomit, diseases and sweat and travelling too fast to keep your soul. The scent of all those souls abandoned, tearing, you kick it up when you walk. Simon checks you in like your luggage—you can’t think where your luggage came from—and there are men with guns here and surely that could lead to bad mistakes and you should go home now, it’s time for that, but your brother tells the desk woman that you won’t smoke and will sit near the aisle and that you are carrying no explosives and here is your ticket and boarding pass and here is your passport in order, although it contains the picture of someone who is not truly you and, judging yourself against your papers, it’s terribly easy to spot the forgery. The cheap, dull fake.
But Robert knows me—he knows that I’m real and like this and correct.
No Robert with you here, though, only Simon
who keeps you drinking coffees, drenches you with them so much that your small bones have started to trill and he’s got you reined in where he can watch you, gauge you, until the last possible call when you have to be freed, allowed to go off and be somewhere you’ll disappoint him, suspend all bets and disgrace yourself and drink.
He doesn’t meet your eye as you spin and wave to him, because he can already see you failing. You are good money going after bad.
At the metal detectors you leave your keys in your pocket—so used to being locked in, you forgot that you had them—and the uniform people pat at you and search you and pass you through with frowns and you ask where the crowds are, the travellers, but no one says and you are very loud here, this corner being full of nods and whispers, which is strange. You are strange, but this is stranger and maybe, along with everything else, you are going deaf.
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