Although, I don’t like—I categorically do not like. Everything about this is despicable, but what else is there? I have to leave and nobody will let me, will help. Every time I’ve mentioned anything, they’ve only joked that I can start off walking whenever I want, because they’ve been sure that we’re so far from everywhere here and that I’m trapped because I don’t have any money.
But now I do.
VIII
How it happens is a long story always.
And sometimes your whole, long explanation will drop on you, into you, eager and uninvited, and it will shudder your joints and your concentration and then jerk you to a stop.
That’s why I can’t walk any more on this pavement which is near Heathrow Terminal I don’t care and also not far from dreadful accommodation where the room key arrives with a tag attached that’s shaped like a mutant leaf. I am helplessly nailed between two second-rate locations and trying not to find this symptomatic of my moral state. Traffic passes in the road and someone American-looking—pressed slacks and preternaturally white shoes—is dragging a suitcase my way and glancing anxiously about her at the horrible choice of motels slouched behind me. I can be of no assistance, can’t even nod as she trundles past in a tiny cloud of worry and stale Anais Anais.
If I could currently speak, I would tell her—skip the next place on the left across the car park: it’s improperly clean and the beds are extremely unpleasant: I was fucking an obnoxious married man in one last night. Don’t know what got into me—that is, I’m sure I can guess, but I don’t want to.
Yes, indeedy, fucking and sucking (I like my degradations to rhyme) with a white-bellied, spineless, wispy-haired freak—that being the sort of lifestyle choice it seems I was born to make. I can’t wait to try a new blackout and unleash my luck, in the sure and certain hope it will deliver the most humiliating, Technicolor shames: dense Edgar Allen Poe scenarios which make coming back to consciousness one long and very much adulterated scream. Oh, the fun I have—it could spread all the way to Dublin and back, it’s such a cavalcade of joys.
But, in fact, I can’t say this, or anything else to the sad American. I’m too busy filling with more recollection than I can hold, so much that it’s bruising: the key to Room 536 and the unused knickers in my holdall and going to Heathrow from Canada, via Budapest and trying not to kiss the (who could have thought it) married Mr. Wispy—who may have been called Mr. Stott—those oddly resilient lips, and the smell of him which I still have—or the taste: something, anyway, that I can’t be rid of—and the memory of being there and not drunk enough to completely erase him, to ignore the desperate lurching of his tepid, little groin and settle my stomach and just come—at least come—and then there’s the full English breakfast I haven’t eaten and the bill I haven’t paid and the money I haven’t a right to—Hitt’s money—asleep in my wallet along with the credit card of an M. H.Virginas.
This is a total disaster, isn’t it?
Plus, I am yawning. This would probably not be visible to the untrained eye, but I am slowly and viciously yawning from my ankles up, the warmth of it undulating in my veins, and I know this yawn will have its nasty way and become absolutely the roaring, unnatural, almostorgasmic, total-body spasm, which indicates that, early yesterday, I must have taken some variety of benzodiazepine. Which was very bad of me— after twenty-four hours that stuff is guaranteed to cause me disabling, persistent, drooling yawns. It’s problems like this which mean that, unless I can’t help myself, I don’t ever meddle with drugs.
Nevertheless, they are not my primary concern as hundredweights of smirking and intimate facts keep falling in at me like the Potempkin ’s anchor chain: link after link after link. They’re bullying through now with my farewell to the clinic: the gold and blue British Columbia dawn, gentle and dim, when a tourist couple’s SUV first slowed and then waited while I trotted up to reach out for their door and opened it into the usual, dreadful freedoms. Before that, was the trudge from the fence around Clear Spring in the mountain cold and being sure to whistle cheerily and make noises, reassure the night-time bears, my holdall swung over my shoulder to take the weight, but nothing too bad about this situation: mainly the lift and thrill of having grubbed under the rusty chicken wire and broken outside, being on my way, stepping home into my filthy, old skin. Before that, I was soft-shoeing harmlessly over the muffled lawns, sliding along between watchful squares and dabs of light and removing myself from therapeutic care, stretching and finally breaking the tracks that led back to Thoreau House and the porch roof I climbed down from and the window I left open and the room I had abandoned with its narrow pine bed.
Where I left Gregory, half awake.
I didn’t mean him.
I didn’t mean Mr. Wispy, either, but I was drunk, so he didn’t count. He was like catching flu: he could have happened to anyone.
With Gregory, I was sober. For three nights.
But only because I love Robert.
Only because I missed Robert and my tendons and sinews were growing healthy and being communicative again. The detox was working, my body bouncing up quick from the dead and feeling dapper, sensitive, in need—but nobody was there to need me.
Except Gregory with the shine under his skin and his boy’s kisses, laughing kisses, that opened and drew you on to the nub of his tongue. And the way that he angled his head down when he lay to hide the grafts and ruin that his knife had left behind. It gave him a double chin, but I didn’t mind that.
Poor Gregory.
And poor me—that first, blasting yawn is building up from the small of my back and another take-off hauls along the morning and I shut my eyes and think of Robert and see Gregory bright beneath me in my shadowed room, the pair of us smooth from so much soaking in thermal water and we’re slipping, sweating, trembling in the tiny space we’ve made under the lights-out silence: we can feel it strapped around us, binding us raw against each other, rubbing until the blood growls in our ears and we abandon breathing and finish with a jerking, melancholy burn. The result of life returning, the way it must.
His face then: there’d be an ache of fear in it, along with the soft dark of his look and then the private half-smile: a little for himself and some for me—each time, each night the same. All of him gentleness and calm until we started, until we were moving and moved by the size of him.
But he reminded me of Robert.
I wouldn’t have done it, otherwise.
Anyway, letting me have a whole room to myself: what was the clinic trying to do? It was utterly irresponsible. Even a child could have climbed up to that window and there were no proper controls, no effective security measures to prevent inmates slamming each other through every terror in the night until the pair of them came out mindless, bitter with heated sulphur and tranquil and sore.
Oh, God, this is a complete disaster.
And I am, too.
Again.
And this is when Heathrow shrugs around me and the yawn flowers up and my mouth is moving and then the rest of me as well, while my brain’s in this state of surrender which leaves me unprepared for the moment when I am very, very sick. Twitching like a puppet and sick to my soul. Although I do manage to miss my own feet.
This isn’t too bad, though: it even feels purging and I could do with a purge. I cough a few times, spit discreetly—there are few things more graceless than women who spit—and then I step over the mess as if it has nothing whatever to do with me. Of course, from this moment onward, it does have nothing whatever to do with me.
Then it takes a ridiculous period of wandering about—interrupted by yawning and a brief, but hugely expensive, cab ride—to set my body on the path to any measure of permanent recovery.
“And a box of matches, please.”
I find a corner shop of the proper type, stocked with the average, last-minute, urban requirements: newspapers, Domestos, Rizlas, bin liners, cat food, sweets. Cooried into one side are the shelves of wine and the chiller cabinet which glea
ms quietly to itself and holds, among other items, three cans of lager. I buy these.
“And a box of matches, please.”
I have to buy the box of matches, because purchasing three cans of larger before lunchtime could seem, at a certain level, dysfunctional. It could look as if I have an overbearing need for alcohol. I don’t. I’m fresh out of a clinic and I’ve cleaned up very well and have largely benefited from past mistakes, so the last thing I’m going to need is alcohol—and I don’t like lager. Unfortunately, drinking three lagers is the only way to even myself out until the benzos have worn off. So I buy the magic matches and make this respectable.
Three morning cans of lager = embarrassment.
Three morning cans of lager with an added box of matches = shopping.
The elderly assistant regards me with wisdom and kindness and we nod to each other before I leave and take up a relaxed position beside a litter bin in order to empty the lagers, one-two-three: popping them— watching that tiny smoke which will breathe up from any can when it’s first opened—and then draining them and dumping them and, of course, yawning throughout.
Above me, the sun is established for the day, sweetly warm, and an amount of spontaneous healing is taking place in many of my systems. I will be steady soon. Exhaust fumes and toxins are birling about and might eventually take their toll on my lungs and so forth, but I’m going to avoid any damage by swinging across the road and taking a dive into the Underground, burrowing along until I come up at King’s Cross and can buy a ticket North.
There will be no more drink for me today—I won’t require it. This is as true as gravity, as the weight of hydrogen. I am going to take a pleasant and orderly train trip and follow it with a bus ride to my flat. Nothing random or untoward will befall me en route. Enough is, after all, occasionally enough.
I’ll have a bath when I arrive and a bit of a spruce up, here and there, before I take a good, deep nap. Then I’ll be ready to tell everybody that I’m better and I’m back.
There are few things finer, I think, than being refreshed and ready and strolling into your favourite bar, your local. The way the purr of conversation widens as you pull back on the door and then the convivial wash of pubsmell hugs you in. Pubsmell is heightened at night by extra spillages and smoke, but it’s purest in the calm of a still afternoon—and this is a still afternoon—when it’s much more plainly something to do with the presence of men over time and with disinfectant and enjoyment and homely, comforting staleness and rest for the wicked and likeable dirt. It is a complicated phenomenon, but it’s possible to miss it terribly and I would know it anywhere.
It welcomes you into the place that will never change: the booths and stools and the pictures of dead golfers—and, inexplicably, a horse—and the easy, happy curve of the bar that courteously lifts your eye to the mirror and the optics. I know people build miniature gantries in their houses, but this shouldn’t be allowed: it’s a terrible insult to everyone concerned. The tall gleam of charged glass, the winking ranks of spirits, the delicious confusion of lights and shades and labels, they’re only perfected in a pub, a bar, on licensed premises. You wouldn’t rig up an altar in your front room, so why imagine you could try it with a gantry?
But every millilitre is ideally sited here and I’m gliding in to greet each one of them, rested by twelve hours of sleep and unscathed by a wholly sober journey. Both halves of me are working as they should do and I have no particular urge to yawn. I am the prodigal returned and washed and perfumed and my hairspray is keeping a grip and, under my casual jeans and feminine sweater, I am wearing pink socks, a fresh bra, brand new knickers and I even took the time to comb my pubic hair. I’ve never done this before, but it was strangely satisfying and I’m not altogether unlikely to do it again. Mild make-up, but my mascara is tremendously impressive—all of my lashes perfectly aligned, when they usually don’t quite manage that, somehow.
I order a simple orange juice: because I can make a non-alcoholic choice, it doesn’t put me under any pressure, provoke any lack: and I turn to my right, where I know the familiar faces are already watching me. I haven’t wanted to deal with them directly until now, I had an entrance to make, but this is when I ease the head round and check who’s here.
Robert.
He should be at work, unless this is a weekend. I ought to have found out what day it is, what date—maybe April the fifth?—it feels like an April the fifth. Yes, because I have an idea that yesterday was the fourth. In other times I would have bought a paper for orientation, but I can’t read the papers any more. They hurt.
So I’m not prepared for this, for Robert—I didn’t think he’d turn up until later. The others, I anticipated, but at this point they’re hazy, muted: I seem unable to take them in with any urgency.
Robert.
He’s being especially in focus and three-dimensional, leaning at the back of the booth and giving a packet of crisps undue attention. And he’s already set the spring of interest in my stomach: nerves, fondness, exposure, guilt: I didn’t want to cope with this in company.
“Hello.”
Bobby, the Parson, Maurice and the man with tattooed hands: they chorus me an answering hello with additional enquiries and remarks— don’t I seem great, very well turned out, that break must have done the trick.
Robert says nothing. He eats a crisp with quiet malevolence. The boys incline themselves towards him, making a space so that he can chip in and then, when he doesn’t, we have to stare in his direction while he still keeps himself belligerently to himself, raising a sip of yellow wine to moisten his fragment of snack. While his head is up, he meets me with a tiny, unreadable glance and then returns to studying his hands.
I paper over the subsequent silence with “Hello, Robert.”
He manages a dull “Hello, Hannah” towards the window, as if he’s reciting a line he doesn’t want. I mime drinking a touch of my orange juice, which I find, like everything else, to be highly unsatisfactory.
He has no right to be upset. He doesn’t know a single thing that could upset him.
I stay on my feet and the boys stand to join me. There’s no room for another stool at the table and, in any case, they need to shake my hands and, of course, the Parson will try to kiss me, Bobby too, and I will have to duck aside, but pat their arms nicely after, in consolation. Robert is the last to rise and keeps quiet as he brushes past me, grimly heading for the Gents. The contact is unnecessary, deliberate, and gives me the scent of his skin, unbalancing. He would like me to remember and to need him, to be powerless. He’s got his wish.
Maurice hisses intently across me at the Parson, “There are twelve.”
“There are fourteen. Do you want me to name them? With a meditation that’s appropriate for each? If it’s an argument you’re after, Maurice, then you’ll need something to argue about. At the moment, you’re just wrong.”
With the Parson safe in a former conversation, I only have to duck Bobby’s advances while the crowd of us drifts up to lodge along the bar.
“There are twelve. It’s not something I’m going to forget— Hail Mary, full of grace, Chieftain o’ the pudding race: repeat until you’re thirteen— I can’t forget.”
“Well, if you’re not going to take it seriously.”
“Why should I—it never took me seriously. There are twelve . . . there’s Jesus meets his blessed mother and there’s St. Veronica and . . . the three falls, two submissions and a partridge up a pear tree . . . I mean, I don’t care, but there are twelve.”
“Fourteen.”
Nobody seems interested in where I’ve been. Bobby’s snuggled into a whisky, the man with the tattooed hands has wandered off and Maurice is doggedly asking for trouble. No one ever discusses religion with the Parson: that’s why we call him the Parson. And Robert is still in the Gents. Not that he couldn’t have sneaked out and gone by me while I was distracted, but I do believe I would have noticed. Somebody would have noticed. And why would he want to sneak out, in
the first place? Why would he be so determined to avoid me?
From here I’ll be able to see when the door opens, any movement will catch my eye. Although he should have joined us already.
He’s just making me wait.
When I’ve thought of him constantly and been faithful, kept my love faithful in all of the ways that could matter to anyone.
For fuck’s sake, I talked to Gregory about him every night. I spent as much time doing that as I did with the other things. I wanted Gregory to know, to understand I was in love.
And I told him the truth. I am in love.
Robert emerges, looking as if he has washed his face a number of times—neat and flustered, both at once. There is a pause as he sways on one heel and might be moving towards the door, leaving, but then he rubs at his ear and comes forward, mildly awkward. He keeps Maurice and the Parson between us, won’t acknowledge anyone, as he slides both elbows on to the bar top and orders a pint of stout. He never drinks beer unless he’s stressed.
The Parson is also stressed. “How are you getting twelve? You just take him up to Calvary and leave him? Anyone can die—it’s what happens next that counts.”
The bickering is getting a bit much. “Hey, listen—I’ve got jet lag. I’ve been away for a long time. I wanted to be with my friends and have a cheery, peaceful afternoon and for the evening?—I wanted to spend it with people that I like. People I care about.” I am, naturally, only saying this for the benefit of one of those people present—the one who is cutting me dead. “And so far I’ve had a shite welcome and you two are just yelling numbers at each other.”
The Parson gathers up his Sabbath voice. “Stations. We’re yelling Stations. And we’re not yelling.”
“I don’t care! Just stop! It’s not as if you actually are a parson, is it? We just call you that. Because we’re polite.”
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