Paradise

by A. L. Kennedy

  Simon was watching me, huge-eyed and proud, because I said it for him—the fine, shining comfort—that we’re never lost, that our death always calls us, that we know the way.

  Between each recitation a few boys and girls rehearse their illustrative mimes. Pilate, whose tie is squint, looks puzzled. Mary is sad. Soldiers point fingers and laugh noiselessly. They tug at the sleeves of Jesus’ pullover, pat down a crown of nothing on his head and beat him wildly with thin air. Somebody passes him an invisible weight and he hugs it inaccurately, then drops like a shot detective, like a stuntman taking a punch. So someone else drags the weight along without him, hunching up under its undefined length. Then Jesus is left by himself, awkward, and the other children fidget, because this is near the end, before he leans his arms out against space, balances inside the thought of who he is, and becomes still: for a moment, makes everything still.

  They pack themselves up after that: well mannered, promising, no disturbance beyond scuffling and whispers, and they file away past me towards the door.

  I don’t raise my head to them, don’t show them my face, because they wouldn’t understand it and I might worry them. I feel one of the teachers pause slightly beside me, perhaps checking to see if I am safe, perhaps setting herself as a shield between her pupils and a dubious stranger: the low, sharp breath of a misguided life. Still, I’ll do them no harm, I don’t matter: they’ll be back here on Good Friday, Easter Sunday, whenever they plan to perform, and they won’t even think of me.

  Far to the left, across the aisle, something is moving beneath the pews: a dark scuttle, more like a spider than a mouse. When the place has emptied, the fat door breathes back to its frame, sealing me in.

  There are six hours, maybe five, of our holiday left when Robert wakes me. The hotel room is jerking with pale television light: a woman in a T-shirt on a perfect beach, saying something about tipping: that the locals don’t expect too much.

  Robert is burning, wet with a day of drink, thick and heavy with it, hands scalding where they touch.

  “Sorry.” The word we learn in so many languages, the only one we absolutely need. “I am. Sorry. Hannah?”

  “Fine. You’re sorry.” I’m almost sober, starting to bruise as the alcohol leaves me. “I’m trying to sleep.”

  He stands back from the bed, fights out of his coat and then sits again. “Donbe like that.” A smooth, clean surface is pushed against my hand. “See.” I can hear the light swing of liquid inside glass. “For us.” He kisses my ear. “For you.”

  “What?”

  “Vodka.” And he wraps me suddenly against him, holds me inside what feels like a kind of despair. “I love you.” Closes me in that sweet smell he has, that sweet, sweet skin.

  Robert Gardener: the sight of him splintered around me all day: his ghost turning a corner, hailing a cab, drifting across any number of entirely unimportant men.

  Robert Gardener with me now, even more when I let my eyes shut, when I feel him smile.

  “Hannah? I love you. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” I kiss his ear. “Where were you?”

  “Nowhere.” His arms relax. “I brought vodka. We can have it now.”

  “That’s right. We can have it now.”

  An untouched bottle and the man who loves me, the man I love.

  I am cutting lemon slices: thin half-circles, notched to fit on the lip of a glass. No one likes doing this, because it stings. You think you’re intact, not even a paper cut, but the lemon juice will always search out something, sneak in and bite.

  When I need to curry favour in the bar, I volunteer for slicing. I usually do need to curry favour, being not necessarily an ideal employee.

  “Busy, isn’t it?” Robert’s in visiting me and on the water tonight. He’s also full of fruit and vegetables, he says, to make him well. “Mm-hmm . . . lot of people in.” I wasn’t aware that he’d been ill, but according to him, he’s felt out of condition for a while, now every morning this week, he’s gobbled down vitamins and a small cup of green liquid that smells of horses and makes him wince. “Very busy for a Wednesday . . .” The new regime hasn’t exactly put a zip in his conversations.

  “Give it another hour—then it’ll be busy.”

  “Don’t know how you stand it.”

  “Neither do I. Try not to look as if we’re talking—the boss is in.”

  “All right.” He makes a half-turn and sights down the length of the bar: the leaning, twitching, signalling line of would-be drinkers. “Another water would be nice.”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  “No. It wouldn’t. But it would be wet. And you could put a bit of lemon in it.” He seems tired, glum.

  “Your wish is my command.”

  Abandoning my slicing, I pour him a glass of wet, slap on his lemon and some ice. “There you go.” And I take his two quid, almost without laughing. Teetotalitarianism, we can’t help but punish it: two pounds for a water, two pounds fifty for an orange juice—those fuckers don’t stay smug for long with us. “What about the Atkins Diet?—you could try that.”

  He’s barely audible. “No thanks.” Being full of fruit and vegetables can be draining.

  “A cow a day, roasted on a bed of cow, stuffed with cow chunks and topped with a single pound of cheese—how could you refuse?”

  “No thanks.” I’ll fry him some bacon tomorrow—for his own good. And a nice Irish coffee for breakfast.

  “Look, I have to do some serving now. But then I’ll be down here again for the slicing.” I talk to the side of his head, as if we’ve never met, are not meeting. “Whatever we don’t need, we dump in the fridge. There are twelve-year-old slices in there—a whole lemon civilisation: art galleries, schools . . .” His face tries to seem a little amused, but his eyes aren’t happy.

  “I’d like a word then.”

  “Okay. You can have one. When I’m back.” I brush across his fingers with my thumb. We enjoy this because it looks like nothing, a tiny accident, but it means we are together, we are us.

  The peak of the evening levels and begins to ease. I barge through a handful of rounds, trying to catch Robert’s eye as I move, but he’s still tucked in the corner: his back to the wall, his side to the bar top, studying the room, something in his face extremely gentle, soft. Another chance for me to notice how fine he can look.

  Then I slide in behind the chopping board again, take up the knife. “What particular word did you want? Our special tonight is molybdenum. ”

  “Oh, I don’t . . .” He folds his arms, nods down his head. “Maybe this isn’t . . .”

  The only thing that could make him this upset would be a bad day at work: an unexpected biter, an under-anaesthetised extraction, somebody else making stupid complaints.

  “Come on. You can tell me—I’ll even get you started. What’s a nice dentist like you doing in a place like this?”

  “Leaving.”

  “Yeah, it does get a bit much. They’d have to pay me to stay. In fact, they do. But not nearly enough.”

  “No, I mean leaving.”

  By which he doesn’t mean leaving, of course. “What?”

  “I have to go.”

  I can’t see his eyes. “Will you be round tonight?”

  “Don’t make this difficult.”

  “Don’t—What?” I can’t see his eyes.

  “I’m going. I have to stop.”

  “You can’t.” If I could see his eyes, it would make this different.

  “That’s it, Hannah. I’m sorry.”

  “Where?” Questions are good, they make people answer and that means they have to stay. “Where are you going?”

  He rubs his neck, still here.

  “Where, Robert?”

  “No.” He presses the heels of his hands against his eyelids. “No. I’m going away. I have . . . the daughter, my daughter. I mean. I don’t know.”

  “This why you’ve been on the health kick? Recovering from me?”

  “No. No, I j
ust . . .”

  “Why did you come here to tell me?” My voice louder than it should be, even with the din around us, the shouting, the fuckmesoon laughs. “Robert? Didn’t I deserve some privacy?”

  “You did. You do. I’m sorry. I am.” And now he lets me see his face, when I don’t want to, when I am scared of it: the emptiness in it and the scared eyes, the receding light. “I didn’t mean . . .” He reaches forward over the broad top of the bar and grips my wrist, kisses my cheek and withdraws before I can start to touch him back. Then he walks out of the bar, unsteady despite all the water. There’s a moment when I lose him in the crush, but he’s clear when he reaches the door, I can watch him do that, open it, step through.

  When I swing my head, the manager is watching me and I feel myself try to construct a puzzled smile to make her leave me be. And in a while I will drink: drag it in so hard and obviously that it will steal away my job and I will go home and keep on drinking until I destroy whole days of myself, a week, and I will go to his flat at a point I don’t remember and find there is a new lock, no curtains, bare floor behind the letter box, everything stripped and no one there and I will drink until the spider comes into my mouth, I will drink until there’s no one there, I will drink until I leave me, until I leave myself alone.

  But now I am cutting lemon slices: thin half-circles, notched to fit on the lip of a glass. No one likes doing this, because it stings. You think you’re intact, not even a paper cut, but the lemon juice will always search out something, sneak in and bite.

  The wind is driving sand along the dunes, lifting it like smoke and shadows in a layer that becomes another shoreline flickering over the surface it has scoured to a dun skin.

  My head aches with the cold and I’m unsteady and the sea roar has taken every sound. Water-light and perspectives are pummeling round us, racing away until we are all of us unreachable as we waver on in silhouette, curling and leaning against gusts, facing the breakers, or walking along beside them, fighting the length of the beach.

  And this is the Hour Long Beach: the one I used to visit when an hour could be endless, when the whip of the air cupped around me, the invincible restlessness, made me run until I fell, made me light-headed, drunk.

  I used to imagine this was Our Long Beach, because that’s how it felt. But it didn’t belong to us, it was just a place we took an hour to walk, somewhere we drove to on family outings: always too chill and blustery for good picnics, even with the windbreak, even in July—always the small shock of sand in what you ate: the rolls, the foil-wrapped chicken legs, the dented strawberry tarts—the signs of parental care, of preparation for my benefit. The love they had for Simon and for me.

  No picnic today, though, and my brother isn’t with us, because he doesn’t believe in me. He thinks I will never get better, only worse. He thinks there is no hope. He is convincing. Still, we came here anyway: my mother and father brought me, showed parental care again, and preparation for my benefit.

  They have no idea what to do with me, not any more, and I can’t help them. So they offer me nursery food and cheerful magazines and take me on the jaunts that pleased me thirty years ago. Here, they let me step out a few yards ahead and follow, arm in arm. My mother has a little shopping bag that holds sandwiches we won’t eat and a pointless thermos. My father wears a cap I haven’t seen before—his free hand flies to it, now and then, to keep it in place. For a while, I turn and walk backwards so I can see them and they can see me and we can seem happy for each other.

  But I make them upset. Just by being here and as I am, I do them harm.

  So I wouldn’t be with them if I could help it, only I haven’t been well, really haven’t been well. I woke up in a hospital bed one afternoon and found I’d been having trouble with my brain. I had to call and ask a nurse about what I remembered thinking, about being mad—because everything I had believed for the previous week did seem suddenly very mad, clearly changed to nothing, the terror of nothing, idiocy.

  The nurse just went back to her station and left me with myself and a ward full of old men staring, flinching at private threats, messing their beds. Still, fairly soon after that, the doctors let me go—once I could prove I was back in my own mind—or fully out of it, not scratching away for days against the inside of my skull.

  I was very tired after that and thin—my father said I was looking thin—and so I went home: home to him and my mother and they didn’t mind. I hadn’t realised before that when you’re too sick and exhausted to manipulate or lie and you know you’ll get no more from anyone and the people who love you have finally stopped—then all of that seems to provide you with one last chance, precisely when you couldn’t care less and are waiting to die. You don’t even have to ask, you just stand there and the people who loved you, love you again. They surrender and let you in.

  Except Simon.

  It’s over with him.

  But my parents, they haven’t given up. They’ve fed me and let me sleep and now we’re at the seaside in gloves and overcoats and it’s a bitter May afternoon and will bring us rain and this doesn’t matter—I am here and the whip of the air cupped around me, the invincible restlessness, makes me run and I do not fall and I am not drunk, I am only still at my heart for the first time in a month, emptying out into the rage of everything.

  I head for the sea’s edge across harder and harder sand, over the ribs left by the tide, and I press myself against the slabs and slants of wind until I reach the flat, ambiguous stretch where a thin sheen underfoot turns the sky out flat beneath me. There might be a lake here, low and smooth beyond the last reach of the breakers. And out at this limit, but far ahead, one or two figures tremble, dark against a break of sun. A few others follow behind, it’s hard to tell how many—all that’s plain is the trick of bright water supporting our feet, the soft blue where we walk on it.

  I’m out of breath, I notice: my pulse too lively, butting at me, shuddering my arms. I remember to look for my parents, the doubled shape that could be them, and when I wave as if all is well, the gesture ratchets above my head, jerks out its arc in time to my blood. They wave back and I work on towards the low headland where the shore curves and folds in against itself.

  Even with a firmer surface underfoot, I have taken the full hour to reach here—perhaps longer, I don’t know when we set out. I’m tired, too: not strong yet, my efforts still smothered by something that I can’t identify. And I’m alone now, no one else has come this far.

  This is where the sand changes, hardens to a crust that breaks around your foot more and more often until you sink in to your ankle at each step. But you labour up the final rise and find, with one more push, the still place: the sea in a small, round bay, lapping like a summer pool, the scent of seaweed, the air dreaming at your face, motionless, filled with the metal gleam of liquid. You crouch by the water’s edge and want to touch it, do touch it, watch your hand reaching into something real and feel it there.

  You lift your head and see, a few yards off, a seal: the gleam of it, the face peering over the wavelets at you, inquisitive. And you are not sure if this is true, or if this is a thought of yours, a way of frightening yourself, so you stand up quick and you dry your fingers on your coat and when you search again, there is no seal, there is no sign of anything.

  XI

  It’s raining: nothing too heavy, only a grey dust edging down and putting a shine on to the pavement. A mother helps her daughter from their car, shuts the door softly, and they both begin to walk, comfortably readied for the weather with long, plastic macs—red for the mother, yellow for the girl who swings her arms, tugs at the brim of her matching sou’wester. Even watching them from behind, it’s easy to tell they are fond of each other and enjoying the fun their own company makes. Perhaps they are also heading for some treat, but themselves in their macs and the rain are already enough.

  From around the corner comes a thin man in a cheap blue blazer, cream shirt, old tan slacks, bad shoes, unshined. At first it seems tha
t he must know the woman and the girl, because when he sees them, he flings up his hands—one of them holding a small umbrella—and he laughs. Stalking across the pavement, light-footed but intentionally slow, he swings from side to side, and the umbrella tugs and burrows in the breeze and his grey hair—already unruly—is getting wet, his blazer, too. He smiles enormously at the girl and manages something approaching a pirouette. As he draws closer, it soon becomes clear he is almost singing—he doesn’t have words any listener could decipher, but his hopes are in that direction and, quite plainly, he feels he is producing something fine and musical. This being the case, his peculiar zigzags and darts, the bouncing umbrella, can all be read as pure performance, as proof he believes that he can dance. He is caught in his wish to be singing and dancing in the rain, his thoughts towering round him, building the happy prison that will hide his day.

  He passes by the couple with a scampering rush, and they turn as he barges on, they giggle. They don’t take him as a threat: only wink at each other, because, in providing a contrast, he has made them more special, more sensible, more safe.

  By the time he reaches us, my father and I have halted and the man shuffle-stumble-steps across in front of us, veers to the kerb and then plunges across the road without ever acknowledging we are here. He reaches the far side and walks in the gutter for a while, before my father takes my hand and squeezes it, steals my attention.

  “We’ll just get some bread. Maybe see what fruit they have in. It’s never very good this time of year. The fruit.” He’s started wearing suede shoes: they give him a flat, defenceless stride.

  I don’t have that excuse. “No. I suppose not.” Balancing next to him on ground that I can’t trust, taking it slow because anything else stretches my nerves.

  We don’t mention the man, the drink in him, the shame of it, of me.

  “We can go by the river for a while, if you would like.” My father lets my hand go, but with a gentleness, reluctance.