It’s good that he talked about it, but the way that he talked about it made the whole thing seem unfinished. It just wasn’t clear—was he admitting there was something he hadn’t told me and now I know it and that’s that, or was he half admitting he hadn’t admitted everything and I still don’t know the one thing that’s important?
Which is what I would have done—the half-admitting. It makes you feel better, makes the other person relax. I’d have tried it.
But with Robert I haven’t tried it—I wouldn’t.
I haven’t admitted anything. Is that the problem? Has he guessed there are things I should say? I haven’t told him about anyone, anything. But it’s all stuff that isn’t important. And I’m not married, never have been.
If it made him leave me.
He wouldn’t be here.
If he’s married to somebody else, then I can’t marry him.
So I don’t get to do that.
So I don’t have to.
Because I’ve done the married man stuff before: the serious married man stuff with the calls at odd hours and the lunch-break fucks and him making you meet his wife socially (so that you’ll know her, so that you can feel bad, too—except that you don’t, because you’re not married, that’s his problem) and the not going out much in daylight and the wanting to have more of him, the hunger that almost wrecks you when you finally do touch—the whole, huge, locked-in, crucifying, paranoid fantasy. I’ve done that.
But even while you’re choking with your secrecy and need and letting these waves of powerlessness grind at you in the sealed nights and even while you are certain he could complete you, mend you, possibly—why not?—save you—still, there is that small, cold part of you which is glad he won’t ask you to compromise, or change, or be at risk—because he’s married, that’s his problem.
I’ve even wondered if the married men who have affairs are the sort you would want to keep secret, anyway—partners you’d always prefer to have limited influence. It’s never clear with any of them who’s really the more second class, despicable, who isn’t worth the full commitment. He’s the principal betrayer—you have no one to betray. If you measure yourself against him, you’re just that fraction more clean.
But if he leaves you for his wife, then she’s better than you were, must have qualities you don’t possess.
But if you leave, then you’ve found those same qualities elsewhere.
Or, more often than not, you leave because nothing is better than him—nothing or less than nothing, in my experience. You would rather have no one and peace.
This is all you ever learn—that you are lower than the wife and above the husband, that people always want what they should not.
Robert, though: he isn’t what I’ve done before. He is new, all new.
I stop thinking, burned to a close and realise Robert is watching me, “Does my having wine bother you?”
“No.”
“Then what does bother you? Hannah? If you don’t tell me I’ll buy you a chainsaw—then what’ll you do?”
And, having decided to tell him nothing and keep the mood sweet, I hear myself be as unhelpful as possible. “Oh . . . I was thinking there are lots of things that we don’t know.”
“About what—the weight of the universe? Are there whales in the afterlife, do they have wings?”
He’s stalling for time, having caught my meaning and looks so gentle when he does it, his lips shaping the words in a way that reminds me of how he’ll taste, the stubborn little wall his teeth make, the way they like to nip and bluff and then take me in, absolutely in. This is what I want to have in mind, but my drive towards self-destruction seems determined. “No. There are things we don’t know about us.”
He tries another diversion. “Well, I told you everything about me, everything there is. Except for some stupidities with Doheny, which I don’t remember—he remembers, but I’d rather not. Nothing too bad . . . Doheny uses that bar, by the way—that one you work in—eventually you’ll meet up. You’ll like him.”
“Will I?” I refuse to be diverted. “You don’t know about me.”
He slips his hand inside my dressing gown, takes the slow route from the knee and up and round to cup in at my hip. “What should I know about you . . .” Of course, this also opens up the towelling, almost to my waist, which is distracting. “. . . that I don’t already know.” There’s a trace of impatience in his delivery, which finally makes me regret that I’ve brought us to this.
I don’t look at his face, in case he seems severe. I feel his hand straddle the curve of the bone, letting it part his first and middle fingers.
“Is it when you’re drunk? Is it those types of . . . ?” He kisses this into my ear. “When you’re drunk, you’re not yourself. What you do: it’s not yourself.”
“But with you—” My throat has contracted and everything I say sounds reedy. I swallow and try again. “It’s me when I’m with you. When I’m drunk—when I’m very drunk—it’s still me—when it’s with you. And sober. That, too. Then it’s me, too. I’ve never—”
“I know. Me as well.” He kisses again. “It’s okay. We’re us. There’s nothing to talk about.”
I turn and kiss him back: the rise of bristle, the ghost of lavender soap, the smile—the places I find with my eyes closed, because that way I understand them more.
He unties the cord of my dressing gown. “Fooled you.”
“Hm?”
“Can’t have you being worried and grey.”
“And what stops me from being worried and grey?”
“Having nothing to talk about.”
My stomach feels the soft unfurling of his breath. “That’s right.” And this is better than admitting every sin, this makes far more sense.
Because this is honest, it must be. There’s no space here for a lie. When someone is examining you naked, when they are palming your breasts together, so they can lick at both nipples, fast, fast: pause when they know they have you, look up while you ride that first ache “Nothing to talk about.”—When you are rolling back for him and his fingers so he can draw the whole seam of you, slip and part you, find both the ways you give him and then light them, knuckle-deep, light you right up to the root of your tongue. “Nothing.” When you lift to him and take him and are slow, slow, murmuring and giggling like children, this must mean you can have no real secrets.
And then you are done and the television chatters about pendants and twelve-carat chains and you have taken the flavour of wine from his mouth until you both taste the same and you sit up, thigh to thigh, enjoying that you’re still stripped for each other, the friction in your breath from that.
“How many glasses have you had?”
“Two, three—can’t remember . . .” The back of his finger strokes down your breast.
“You leave that alone.” Your thumb brushing the shaft of his cock in return until he lifts your hand away. “Well, you started it . . . How many glasses?”
“No idea. Why?”
“I’m not complaining—it’s nice that you have the wine. I just wondered where you’d got to.”
“Oh . . . sweet drunk. That’s all. Sweet drunk.” He settles his arm at the small of my back.
Sweet drunk is lovely, maybe the best of the normal states. It’s just as it sounds—warm and biddable and friendly and barely involving alcohol at all. There have been evenings when I have rattled straight past the convivial point and on into serious distress, solely because I’ve been hoping to get more sweet. Reaching it is like being six again and having ice cream, but if you drink on, it almost always disappears. Robert is stuffed with it, glowing. “That’s a good one, sweet. Looks good on you.”
“Doesn’t it just. Although I was thinking of getting chocolate drunk in a bit.”
“Why would you need to?”
“Well, it might be fun . . .” And he picks up his wine and draws a mouthful, eases it down, letting me see the grin behind his eyes.
Chocolate drunk
is odd—some drinkers never reach it, some never fail to. Once you’re there, if you were chocolate, you’d eat yourself. You are delighted to find you irresistible and no other opinion counts. It leads to complications.
“No, you fancy yourself too much, anyway. What about cat drunk?”
“Don’t know that one.” He drags one dressing gown over our laps as we cool.
We’ve been perfecting our list for months, but haven’t run over it lately—not since I’ve stopped drinking myself. “Cat drunk—when you do that thing where you look over somebody’s shoulder, as if there was a lunatic behind them with an axe. The way cats do.”
“Ah . . . like ghost drunk.”
“Yes, but if you’re ghost drunk you could be seeing anything—and you dodge about more.”
“Because of the ghosts.”
“Indeed.”
We’ve made official definitions for large drunk, small drunk and fire drunk—all of which are obvious, but handy. Then there are the subtle variations of movement—sand drunk: only able to walk as if labouring over sand—locked drunk: only able to rush in spasms from one paralysis to the next—risen drunk: as if you were risen clumsily from the grave— and water drunk, one of Robert’s inventions, “Where the air, without warning, becomes liquid, this causing you to fall, unnaturally slowly, to the ground.”
Deaf drunk, we don’t welcome, it makes people belligerent—and is also an instant pain in the arse, if you happen to work in a bar.
“Well, if I can’t be chocolate—”
“I told you, you’re already chocolate.”
“Well then, transparent. I want to be transparent drunk.”
“Do you have enough wine for that? Anyway—why?” Not that I’ve ever met anyone who can will themselves transparent—it always comes to you when you haven’t a bad wish in your heart and then leads you astray while you think you’re invisible. “Hm? D’you want to do bad things?” It is proof that alcohol and God have the same sense of humour.
“No. I want to do very bad things.” And he gives me the sly boy’s grin, the one that is lazy with wine and has a cunning that moves so slowly it becomes a type of candour. “Some very bad things with you.”
“Will I think they’re bad?”
“You don’t think anything’s bad.”
And I laugh, but partly to occupy the time it takes to wonder what kind of woman I am for him and if there were bad things his wife wouldn’t allow.
But if the two of us enjoy what we enjoy, then what’s the problem?
He brushes my lower lip with his finger. His hand smells of sex and we understand that we both know this, enjoy it.
He watches me as I kiss his palm. “I could get Pentecostal drunk.”
“Speaking in tongues?—I could make you do that anyway.”
“Boasting again.”
But what I’d really love is for us to get blessed drunk, child drunk together: to excel ourselves and race into that place of innocence and light where nothing will hurt us and there can be no harm, where we are so powerless and lost that we become holy, that our Maker has to take us in hand.
You see the blessed children all the time, weaving in busy roads which would crush somebody sober, laughing at wounds which would kill—but they’re safe entirely. A crew member on the Titanic, Joughin was his name—I think that’s right—he was the ultimate blessed drunk, blasted out of his mind as the lifeboats filled and the lights went out and the band played the paupers and millionaires to their deaths. But Joughin didn’t die. He walked to the stern as no sane man would and rode it clear down to the ocean, then swam away. And he wasn’t sucked down along with the wreck, didn’t freeze in the pitiless water, even survived a boat’s refusal to take anybody so utterly drunk on board. And he was saved and brought to shore alive, of course alive.
The trouble is, you can’t ever know this condition personally, because, more deeply than any other drunkenness, it makes you go away. I assume that its bliss comes mainly from this absence of yourself—it burns you up completely and grants you the grace of a temporary death while it curls up and rejoices in your soul. So I couldn’t try to share it with Robert—we would neither of us be there.
And I’m not drinking.
Then again, I’m very tired. I’ve had days and days—over a month— of being tired. These levels of anxiety, my new-found ability to ruin whatever’s most precious with suspicions and poisonous memories and fear, the way my head will not shut up, the miseries in my job, the expanding regiments of horrors that charge out in every sleep—I’ve had enough.
This isn’t the way I should be. This isn’t the way that anyone should be.
If I still had a doctor, he would have given me medication.
“Robert?”
“Mm?” He threads his fingers in the hair at my temple, combs through. “Whassit?”
“Do something for me?”
“Course.”
He combs again—it starts a nice tingle at the corners of my eyes. “Have you finished the bottle?”
“Just. Yes.”
“Go and get another, will you? And bring me a glass.”
“Course.” He kisses my forehead. “You’ll be ready for it now. All set. I knew you could manage stopping.” He kisses each cheek, as lightly as my mother would. “And I knew you could manage starting again.” He kisses my mouth, lets me take his sweet-drunk tongue between my teeth, flickers and presses, withdraws. “Welcome back.” He tugs away the dressing gown again.
“I’m not back yet. Go and get the bottle. And my glass.”
X
I’m back in the black house again. It’s moving around me, breathing. It always does.
This time, I look at the darkness and understand its shape: the box of walls around me, the peak of the roof that meets above, one slope of the pitch leaning steep against the other—no more to the black house than this. It’s as plain as a four-year-old’s drawing and nothing inside it but me.
The shake of noise rises, moans, and the unseen, unseeable floor beneath me starts to buckle and then drift. A current drags at it, pulls it from under my feet, before returning, pushing it in, as if I am walking the tide line somewhere, as if I am somehow riding a great sea.
And now the whole house tightens like a sail and seethes with a new motion, something I know is dreadful and heaven-sent, and the seams of the walls begin parting in bright splits and the roof starts to lever away, starts to bleed with narrow glares of white—a Judgement looking for me, breaking through. And I am cold and have been here before and will be here again, will keep on returning until the house is wrecked and takes me with it, until I fall up into the burning absence that I am afraid is the heart of God.
The base of the wall to my left begins to spasm. It gapes.
“Hannah.”
“Mm?”
God having my name already, God lying in wait, taking an interest I don’t want.
“Hannah. Come on. We’re nearly there.”
I swallow and lick my lips. “I’m sorry.”
And I don’t taste of the bad end that I’ll come to: there’s no trace of the black house or the paradise howling outside it, the perpetual roar of light. “I am. I’m sorry.”
I don’t even appear to be dead.
“I am.”
But I recall that I was in a hurry quite recently and then in a cab and now, when I take stock a little, glance about, I see I still am in a cab, the same cab. It’s daytime, daylight: long, sore ribbons of daylight to either side and sunshine and harried pedestrians with anxious hair and grisly brick buildings that loom over fancy doors and a fenced and gated square containing trees, these huge-leaved trees, trunks smooth and pale and patterned in a way that seems reptilian, too much alive.
Robert, hugging me against him, playfully squeezes my right breast. “Back with us, are you?” Which might be amusing if every shift of the cab didn’t hurt my mind.
“Don’t do that.”
The air pushing through the half-opened
window is soaking with stress and leaves an aftertaste of shit. Cars grind and slice around us with malicious glee, while our cab executes its own criminal manoeuvres, the driver sipping takeaway coffee as we lurch along and settling to read his paper at red lights.
So we’re in London.
Yes, of course, we’re in London. I knew that. We’re having a break, a long weekend and this is where we chose to have it. I knew that. I knew that we’re spending our precious free time in the world’s most perversely expensive and unwelcoming capital.
“Did somebody spray something in my eyes?”
“Shhh.” Again he tweaks at me. “You’re just a bit delicate.” He tries to locate the nipple, but it can’t be bothered standing up to meet him. “You’re beginning to feel the pace.”
“And you’re not, I suppose?”
“Nope.” He passes me a can of fizz and caffeine. “Had four of these. They contain ox bile. It says so.”
“Terrific.” My voice is furry, soured.
“Take one, it’ll perk you up. No point sleeping if we don’t have to— we’ve only got . . . forty-two and a half hours left.”
And this did seem a good plan twenty-nine and a half hours ago— that we’d simply stay awake for the duration. Which we felt would maximise the educational and entertainment value of our trip, but the pills that we bought in the bar on Westbourne Grove—I don’t remember when— have begun to make my skin ill-fitting and my eyelids have also become highly abrasive and the muscles in my forearms have been tensed so long that my thumbs have lost all sensation and a good deal of their strength and this is—I can’t deny it—keeping me very much awake, but it’s also really quite unpleasant.
“What was in those things?”
“What things?” Robert ducking his head unsubtly to indicate our driver and his fiendish capacity to overhear.
“The keeping awake things.” Not that our driver is at all concerned with us—he is crashing over sleeping policemen and meanwhile yelling something about carpets—I hope into a telephone.
Robert whispers, “I don’t know. But they’re doing the job, aren’t they? They’re keeping awake things—and we’re keeping awake . . . I think I didn’t ask what they were . . . Anyway, he didn’t say.”
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