Paradise

by A. L. Kennedy

I can’t see her any more because she’s eased behind the chair and it’s too late to sit up and turn for her, because feet are approaching the surgery door and I am losing this, have lost it. “I love him.” Trying to let this sound like proof of the man she didn’t know, the things she didn’t guess, or understand about him. “I love him.” But saying it soft, so I don’t have to hear it and she may not either, as the wrong dentist bustles in and gives me the chance to write down some more lies.

  And my mother’s money is, as she might have expected, uncomfortable in my hand as I pay it over for a check-up and an estimate of treatment I’ll never get, arranged for a woman called Heather who can’t eat shrimps.

  “Excuse me. Miss . . . Winter.” My hand dragging open the door as the little assistant trots up. “You forgot this.” And she hands me an envelope, while studying my face as if I am incomprehensible, ill.

  “But I didn’t—”

  “You did.” She spins and scampers back up the hall. “Good luck.” Sounding slightly muffled and insincere.

  I wait until I’m in the car before I open the envelope, so that I can be in private when I’m disappointed, so that I can let my hands shake and not care. Inside, there’s a slip of paper headed RG’s Home Address. I’m not sure if she meant this as a punishment or a gift.

  Robert’s daughter looks a handful. I know it’s her, because she has his eyes, which is unfortunate: they’re too striking to be feminine, too heavy and dark. I also know it’s her because she comes and goes out of 14 Millbank Lane and that is RG’s Home Address. The skirt of her school uniform is overly short, the ones she wears at weekends, even shorter. Her walk is surly in the teenage way: lithe and fit and truculent and only accidentally sexy.

  I sit here in my car sometimes, watching, and count the things she has from him. So far it’s a fast turn of her head, an angle in her shoulders, a way she stands. Of all his ghosts, she is the most convincing.

  I am, naturally, not here all the time, not even every day. I have another job now, the result of shameless begging to Thomas in my old bar, my local, probably the only place that would take me on. The gang cheered at the start of my first evening and then, in the course of that evening, discovered I wouldn’t give credit, wouldn’t cash cheques, wouldn’t sell on cheap whisky with bad labels, wouldn’t sneak in extra measures, wouldn’t give drink for jewellery or the promise of electrical goods, wouldn’t fall for the lifetime of tricks that I might once have tried on fresh bartenders myself. They still wheedle, here and there, but they know I’m a Judas—they can’t even get me drunk.

  The money keeps me ticking over and buys the petrol to get me out here. Where I can hunch in my back seat while Mrs. Gardener cleans her windows, puts out the rubbish, goes shopping, comes back. She seems to favour Marks & Spencer’s, that expensive ready-made stuff—you might as well order a takeaway, at least that turns up hot.

  I try, I do make an effort, to see if we are like each other. But if Robert had a pattern in mind when he picked us, I can’t find it. She’s taller than me, neater hair with a touch of red in it, fuller hips. For practical things, she dresses like a tomboy, seems much younger and assured. For shopping and perhaps work, perhaps meeting friends of hers, she is rather elegant, even chic.

  Maybe I was simply a change for him. As good as a rest. Maybe I was an accident. Maybe I shouldn’t expect this to make sense.

  I do not ever imagine them having sex.

  And I do not ever catch sight of Robert here. He does not stand near windows, he does not leave or arrive, he does not drive off with his daughter to school in the morning, his wife does not call out his name when she unlocks the door.

  He didn’t leave me for them. He just left.

  I tuck my feet along the back seat and lean my head against the window. I stare at the tarmac, the tiny camber of the road. There’s a strong smell of coffee and obsession.

  Then I am upside down.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I don’t know what I am doing here. I am upside down.

  “I said, what are you doing here?” This is a cold voice, disgusted and enjoying its disgust. “I asked you a question.”

  My hands are in the gutter with bad things and my back is strained and I am attempting to sit up. “I’m . . . I . . .” But then I’ll have my back to her again and she may hit me. “I . . .” I know who this is.

  “Get out of the car.”

  Robert’s wife, so happy that I’m crumpled and rubbing I don’t know what from my fingers on to my jeans and scrambling to be upright, to still be shorter than her, to still be a joke. “I’m sorry.” I don’t like her. I wouldn’t under any circumstances.

  “Gail said there was somebody watching the house, but I didn’t believe her. Then I started to notice you myself. What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “I just . . .” A chill turns in my head and I should be angry, I should be outraged—not her. “You hurt me.” I slam the car door, but it does no good—only startles me.

  Very quiet, dignified. “I hurt you.”

  And I sound like a child now, “I was trying . . .” as if she has some grown-up authority over me and we’re not equals.

  “He’s not here. I presume he was with you for a while. He mentioned something. Do you know how often he’s disappeared? Do you know how much we care, any more? We don’t. But you will not watch this house.”

  “No, I . . .”

  “You will not come near me, or my daughter.”

  “I—”

  “Or I will call the police. If you weren’t so obviously . . . I would already have called them.”

  So obviously what?

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Just go away.”

  She hasn’t the right to call me anything. “I’m sorry.” She hasn’t the right to stand there until I break, move away.

  “If you want to know where he is, try Doheny.” As if this is very funny.

  “I don’t know Doheny.”

  “Or Canada. He was full of that the last time he called us. ‘Such a wonderful way to get better’—all he had to do was borrow enough to get to Canada. If it wasn’t for—”

  And she stops herself, because I am not worth telling, I should not know anything more about her life. I should only have the stinging friction of her wishing me gone as I get into the driver’s seat and start up, bumble out of the parking space just as stupidly as she knew I was going to. When I check my mirror, she’s still there, pressing me along the road with her contempt.

  On the way home, I drive as she intends me to, like a slovenly adulteress. I brake late and change lanes as if I want to die; I almost kill a cyclist turning right. Anyone who saw me would know I was bound to wreck something in the end.

  Arrogant cow. I should have said something. I should have shown her who I am.

  I did show her who I am.

  Eventually, I turn down to the river and pull over. It’s high tide and the water is a dull, chipped blue beneath the curve of the railway bridge. I concentrate on how cool it would be, how thick. The furious knock of my heart slackens and muffles. A light wind bounces against the car.

  Cow.

  I wind down the window for a touch of salt and to hear the regular, liquid breath of the estuary.

  Fucking cow.

  I don’t quite know how long has passed since I left Millbank Lane— maybe half an hour, maybe longer. So it takes me half an hour, maybe longer, to recognise the start of an old, good feeling. First a lightness, a sense of disappearing griefs, and then an almost pre-bottle thrum of warmth.

  The fucking cow said Canada.

  Travel and you leave yourself, escape your soul, fasten your skin against that great, numb blur of motion that puts everything to sleep.

  Canada.

  Travel and build yourself again with no mistakes.

  Canada and I know where.

  There’s only the matter of how you start.

  XII

  I’m not drunk, I’m just out o
f control—there is a difference. “The Dutch stuff—”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “I hate it. I mean the real Dutch stuff, not the British Dutch stuff, or the American Dutch stuff—the stuff that says it’s Dutch—Going Dutch, Coming Dutch, Dutch Uncles on the Job, If the Dutch Cap Fits, whatever hilarious titles they pick for the fake European stuff. Not that. I hate that, too, but it’s not what I’m talking about—I’m talking about the real Dutch stuff, with real Dutch people: happy and toned and incredibly attractive Dutch people having athletic and joyful, consensual sex in delightful surroundings— that stuff—that’s what I hate.”

  I don’t want to be talking about this.

  “Not that I’ve seen much. One film . . . bit of another . . . They might not all . . . A bit of two films . . . We were in this guy’s flat in Amsterdam.”

  Any possible subject would be better. This one is for some other time, and especially some other place.

  “You don’t want to see that kind of thing. You don’t want to be half in the mood, a bit mad, and then here are these shiny and sculpted and highly contented people enjoying each other, the same as you’re certain they would if the camera wasn’t watching—I mean, you really believe that—you believe they’re not being exploited one bit—because they’re all so fucking happy—so it looks more like a sport, like a demonstration, a healthy hobby—and it’s supposed to be stimulating, but it can’t be, because you’re not shiny and highly contented, you couldn’t keep up with them if you tried. It’s all wrong. Forcing you to feel that way. It’s . . . there’s something immoral about it.”

  Although I’ve never doubted, never even much assessed, my performance before, it seems I’m compelled to today. It seems, in fact, that I can’t stop dissecting my sexual anxieties in public, when I only came in here because I’m cold and I have jet lag. I would rather be lying down in my hotel, but the whole of my room there was whining and had this peculiar air, abrasive in your throat, and a wearing quality about the lights, a nasty glare, and the woman at the desk didn’t like me because it was clear that I couldn’t afford to stay anywhere else and I wasn’t speaking French and she didn’t believe there was a dreadful, really penetrating, whine up in my room and so I had to walk outside into the grey, long barrel of the street and this bit of Montreal is nothing but porn shops and Seaman’s Missions and Army Surplus Stores and is generally a big mistake, so I turned up the hill, against the rain, and walked into what seemed to be an acceptable refuge, a decent pub—I’m not good at judging when I’m tired— only it’s plainly a terrible dive now that I’m inside and can assess things properly and I’m hours out of joint and yammering on about Dutch pornography—I have no idea why—because of those previous porn shops, I suppose, or because there is drink, unexpected drink, gleaming and radiating on all sides like a poisonous metal, bottled snakes, and this is putting me on edge, and because the place is strange, unpleasant, and because I am, in some way, afraid that I’ll be assaulted, and so I am loudly inviting this in as a double bluff.

  “They shouldn’t make pornography depressing. It defeats the point.” If I was drinking, playing with the snakes, I would be fine: modulated perfectly, alert but fundamentally secure. Sober, I haven’t got a clue. My spine is actually creaking with unease while I also hear myself. “It’s disgusting. Right now, I wouldn’t watch one if you paid me.” Yes, I actually do hear myself establish the jovial notion that I can be paid to watch Dutch people having sex.

  The man beside me at the bar picks up his beer and tucks the last of it down swiftly. He looks at me and I hold together what I trust is a stern and non-participative face.

  He frowns. “Ya. Okay then. Ya.” There is a mild shake in his head as he swings off his stool and stalks to the door, pushes outside.

  The tendons in the backs of my legs relax and I draw a brief mouthful of orange juice up through my straw. (I like to take soft drinks with a straw, it makes them seem further away from alcohol. And I am supposed to be further away from alcohol.)

  Mercifully, there is no one to hand for more conversation. In fact, there are only three of us here: the barman, who lurks under the optics reading a mangy paperback, a large biker-looking shape, hunched in a seat with its back towards me and a skinny, grubby type who sits in his wheelchair by one of the booths, his energies focused on grimacing at the door: from one greasy trouser leg the end of a urine bag protrudes, amber and fat. I seem to have found my level perfectly.

  Still, the travel plan is running: it’s breathing and beating out under the scuffed linoleum, it’s alight in my brain, acclimatised already, hot and impatient and awake. And since we’ve come this far together, I can certainly shake off Greenwich Mean Time and follow through. I have obsessive-compulsive leanings—they are something about me that I like, they mean I will draw pleasure from pursuit and anticipation before I ever reach my goal. They make me determined, which is what I need to be.

  Because this wasn’t easy. I sold my furniture, my fridge, my stove— which wasn’t entirely mine to sell—I paid out a month’s rent in advance, I spent a whole afternoon in promises and begging with my mother—not lying, not doing an absolute wrong—simply milking her faith and swearing I’ll go back to Clear Spring, which I will.

  For Robert.

  I will go there to find him, because that’s undoubtedly where he is. And this, in its turn, will make me completely well. Therefore, I will go to Clear Spring to get completely well, which also is the very best thing for my mother to believe. So I have allowed her to think the very best and I’ve hit the road with the cash equivalent of everything I own and also the price of her cloisonné vase, the tiny one with the sculpted dragon twined around it, all curlicues and claws, the one I used to love, the one that she kept from the secret time when she was courting and I wasn’t born, the one she has recently auctioned off to raise money for me.

  This doesn’t make me comfortable or proud, but it follows the path of the plan: it has, in that sense, a pure intention.

  Quebec is also a part of the plan—not essential, not ideal, but the cheapest Canadian flight I could buy was the one to Montreal. I’ve made it over the Atlantic, but I still have most of Canada to cross and this will demand strict discipline. It is terribly, terribly easy to lose direction when you already feel abnormal and maybe some further abnormality, some mild chemical nudge, would set you straight and when your funds are truly your funds and precious and limited, but when they are also rendered meaningless by translation into pretty and colourful foreign currency—when it seems you could spend the whole lot in a couple of minutes and not feel a thing.

  Time to go.

  The evening is fully in place when I push myself on to the street and start breathing and striding, breathing and striding, because this will keep my purpose clarified.

  Robert.

  I know I’m drawing closer to my usual self when the two beats of his name can raise a bruise, can open up the dark, old tenderness, the lovely hurt. There’s no panic in the thought of him any more, no loneliness, because I am going to Clear Spring and I will find him there and we’ll be washed in the mineral water, side by side, and we’ll grow strong.

  Or not precisely side by side—they’re only allowing me back on the promise of further fees (my mother bargained them down, because they actually owe me three weeks) and on the strict understanding that I will be segregated from the men and constantly observed. For which they charge extra.

  But we’ll be in the same place, Robert and I, and we will manage to work things out, because we are resourceful. We were drunk together — there’s nothing deeper, and since we both have to be dry, we can do that together and make it bearable. Plus, I have to admit that, although this will be appalling, it will mean that we get to live longer and have more responsive nerves and bodies that do what we ask rather more precisely. I’ve noticed the difference already and this could be good in sympathetic company.

  I fix this in mind as I stumble across my hotel room in the dark, fo
r fear of malevolent bulbs, and then lie in an overtired ache, the bed twitching beneath me, as the walls whine all around.

  In the morning my travel choices are limited. The bus would be cheap, but slow, and would either mean paying for rooms along the way or not sleeping for three days, four days, however long. I know from stern experience that wouldn’t agree with me. The train would be more expensive, just as slow, and might, once again, mean paying for rooms. I could hire a car and sleep in it, but I’m not too sure I could drive off for thousands of miles on the wrong side of the road without a good deal of quite serious liquid support. And, after my last set of troubles, the court took my licence away, which could make hiring problematic. Catching a plane would break me and only get as close as Edmonton, or involve some impossibly costly death-trap floatplane trip, out into nowhere and, even after that, I’d be stuck and have to rely on hitching. Or I could try hitching from the start—just when I’m mortally, soberly aware of every risk an unknown driver might present. The torturers and perverts cruising through the wilderness, they would be bad enough, but they couldn’t top the end-stage drinkers and crazed dependants who’d be aiming for the clinic, going precisely my way.

  Still, I am not downhearted when I check out and leave the hotel. Past the dead plants and the groaning lift, I carry my faithful holdall and then have it jolting beside me in the alien streets, an anchor to something of home as I start the long walk to the station. I’ve settled on trying the train.

  And after half an hour I’m sure I must be close. The summery day has exhausted me, left me sticky beneath my shirt, and I have toured this block at least a dozen times—this block where the map says the station has to be. I have followed a railway-looking sign into a shopping mall and out again. I have scrutinised offices, tower blocks, shops, a statue and a Catholic residence. I have looked for trains. I have listened for trains. Nothing.

  You can’t hide a whole railway station.

  Why would you try?

  Over the road is a hotel tower with arched windows, like so many layers of drooping eyes. It’s the type of clean and caring place I could never afford—the sort that makes passing nearby very faintly shaming. In the doorway a man with a ludicrous hat, an ornate lieutenant governor’s pith helmet, manhandles luggage and opens doors as if this is absolutely what he wants to do. Apparent job satisfaction, any type of satisfaction, that’s attractive, and I’m tired and no building ought to be able to make me ashamed, so I cross to the entrance steps and climb them, because then the helmeted man may smile at me as if he likes me, as if I am an organised, arriving guest.