Paradise

by A. L. Kennedy

  This leaves me, somehow, insecure and so I have to peer down at myself. I am wearing black patent leather shoes, long white stockings that reach half the length of my thighs, long white gloves that close over my elbows. Otherwise I am naked.

  “Appropriate.” His eyes moist, unreadable. “Just the thing for Robert.”

  “Robert?”

  “Who else?”

  If he’s here, we might be safe, we might be able to escape this and be free, because we always help each other.

  “Shame you didn’t comb your hair for him. You both enjoy that.”

  “I don’t have a comb.”

  “Well, neither do I.”

  And I am pushed into the galley, his touch on my shoulders fleeting, cool, before I am there and the door is shut behind me and, kneeling in the gangway, is what must be the manatee mother. Stripped, she is even larger, almost inhuman. And I am not sure if she is alive until she starts, “Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.” This small murmuring, “Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.” As if she’s agreeing to items on some dull, personal list, just running her mind along the inventory. “Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.”

  The splayed mound of her arse faces the doorway, reddened, purpled with blows, individual handprints visible where the bruising is less severe and on she goes with her tiny consents, her mindless repetition, “Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.”

  Robert isn’t here.

  I am sure that I’m dreaming, very sure, but now I do need Robert here. He could make this a good dream.

  I don’t mind being like this, not if it’s for him.

  And I hear the voice again, the one I know, behind me, in the outer room—Robert’s voice, truly his voice, as if he is chatting there with the bartender, sharing a joke with him.

  A dream like this, it’s disturbing, but you can focus and make it good.

  I never did dress up for him, before, not really. We should do that, once we’re out of the clinic. We should have fun.

  We could start it now.

  The galley door swings wide and there is Robert as he should be, in a pullover and corduroys, soft shirt, his hair just slightly disturbed, and I have that kick, that very fine spring of need that I can’t find without him. I have what I have missed, the start of every good and sweet that I have missed. I have my love.

  “Robert.”

  “Hi.”

  I don’t mind when I see the bartender has sneaked in, too. This is only in my mind, so he can watch, he can know how beautiful we are.

  Robert brushes against me: a long, deliberate contact, and then stands above the manatee.

  I want to reassure him. “I know, love, I haven’t a clue what she’s doing here, either. But someone’s been—”

  Which is when he slaps her, doesn’t acknowledge me, doesn’t say anything, simply flails his hand against the right cheek of her arse and then the left and then again, and then again, shuddering her with each blow.

  “Robert. What are you doing?”

  He continues to beat her, his breath starting to rise.

  “Robert.”

  Then he sinks to his knees, one hand rubbing at the folds of her, fumbling, the other unzipping his fly, and I can’t see and I can’t understand, but I still know precisely, know that twitch, remember I love that first moment when he finds his way, but this is not with me, is not with me, this is his cock up some animal stranger, this is him fucking, this is him wanting, this is the harshness in his throat, this is the private song, this is his hand turned in my stomach, this is mine, this is all mine, this is him stealing me, raping me.

  It takes only a minute before he’s made a boy, a darling, trembling into his come and curled against her back.

  “Robert.”

  Then he stands, fastens, straightens himself, goes to the sink and rinses off his hands.

  “Please.”

  He turns, stares at me, puzzled, and then shrugs, goes back to the manatee, starts beating her again.

  “He doesn’t know you.”

  “What?”

  The bartender is leaning in, he’s close, lifting his eyes gradually to mine, reminding me of my useless body, my pointless nakedness. “He doesn’t know you, does he? You never told us that.”

  I can hear that I am crying and I don’t want him to see.

  He cups one of my breasts without interest. “Another word of Nuxalk you might learn—tsusumtim—they were overtaken by darkness.”

  XIII

  And the black house is back, has opened like a mouth. I saw it: heaven’s breath blossoming in, shredding in, and all of the shelter of darkness burned to a scream. I saw.

  So this is the scorch of white now, this is ash clean, this is the weighing, the inspection, this is being swept away.

  And I hope for mercy and I hope for mercy and I hope for mercy and whatever there is left of me hopes for mercy beyond words.

  And so the brightness shifts and shrugs and folds above me, lifts me, wraps me and I am wound in light.

  “That’s the way, Hannah. That’s the way.”

  And I have this horror, this lack of air, because I can feel it, the dreadful tenderness, the way it begins unlocking everything.

  “And, if you help, it’s even better. That’s it.”

  The brush against my skin of hands, of fingertips, of liquid gentleness, the strokes so faint that I start to tremble and cannot stop: my shoulders, the small of my back, my thighs.

  No more of the train, no stumbling off with my hold all into the milk and azure breeze, no being gathered up and stretchered, no being driven between mountains, aspens rising, shining in among the spruces like green prayers, no more of the journey—only this turning under white, this touch that I know, that is smoothing my face, my neck, my breasts, loving the way to my hips, the inward ache, the shivering.

  “We’d better hurry up—she’s getting cold.”

  “Yes. Don’t worry, honey, nearly done. Just getting you cleaned up here.”

  “You want to be clean, don’t you?”

  And I do. I do want that.

  “Good girl.”

  The hands doubling, worrying at me, two pairs here, lifting my arms and wiping, spreading my fingers apart with a damped cloth and being wrong, being unfamiliar, being nobody I love.

  “You’re doing good.”

  And I do want to be clean, but I want Robert more.

  “Oh, she’s off.”

  “Thought she would be.”

  But I’m under this alone, laid out and filled with emptiness.

  “That’s okay, now. That’s okay.”

  Women’s voices, bored little sentences, the sense of them thinned by the glare of white and my own voice in here, too, making chokes of sound, these weeping noises, things you might hear from a child.

  Later that day, or the following afternoon, I go out of Hannah Luckraft’s room and I walk down the stairs of Thoreau House and find Clear Spring set out around me, patient and perfectly convincing. I might think I had never left, if it weren’t for the onset of summer, the sudden rush of growth.

  I take the path through the floral borders: azaleas, the blue glow of rhododendrons, deep, broad ferns, honeysuckle trained against a maple, everything live, eating up the sun—my mother would love it here, the beauty of a garden edging into woods, into forest, into mountain: the only scar, the road that brought me here.

  I remember my mother. There are other people, details, items of importance that I have misplaced. I’m aware of that. But I can remember Sniffer Bobby and 8:42 and Paddy and blood and strawberries and Kussbachek, Herod, Henry, Eddie and every millilitre and new knickers and dead golfers and Simon and werewolves and filth and Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, zirconium oxide, Amelia and John Mills and my father and the Auchtermuchty Sound and Benylin and fuck myself, his sweet-drunk tongue, and fuck myself and Rawhide, absinthe, Lagavulin, dead drunk, red drunk, mad drunk, bad drunk, Marylebone High Street bringing the hammer down and fuck myself and don’t tell anybody I did this and forty-six hours of classical masterpieces and God and God and G
od and the scent of caramel and being sorry, being sorry everywhere, escusezmoi, estutmirleid, seengnohmey, anahasfah, sorry, undskoold, animitzta’eret, midispiache, prasteetye, prepachtyeh, sorry, imipahrerau, bochaanaat, I’m sorry, prominyeteh, proshtahvaheyteh, losiento, I am sorry, I am so very sorry.

  I am.

  And then here’s the gleam of water, the tremor of leaves, the thick rise of rushes and irises at the brink. My lake.

  I’ve thought myself right to the lake.

  A duck claps up in a stunted climb, its mate herding ducklings across the shallows and out into the grass where they scatter like mice. I take the thin path worn at the lake’s edge, walk over the baked imprints of boots in winter mud and aim for the rock. Already, a pale shape is sailing and pressing across the surface, closing to meet me.

  I clamber up the rock and find I recall the warmth of it beneath me. The climb is easy, but slightly awkward and I have to be gentle about it, soft. I don’t want to offend him. By the time I am perched, leaning over the water, the swan is there, the blaze of his wings arced up above his back, neck swollen with affront.

  “Shhh now . . . It’s only me.”

  I have bread with me and break it, hand it down to him as he smoothes and shakes himself, reaches up, beak gaping, oddly bristled, almost like the throat of some hot flower.

  “There you are, then.” He nips at my thumb gently and then shrinks, takes token sips among the wavelets, coughs. “Yes, back again. Friends again. I know.” The usual scent from him of warm, early-morning sheets, a well-used bed.

  “What were you doing, then, while I was gone?”

  And, over to my side, there is another glimmer of movement behind the branches, very bright, but I don’t turn to look and the swan only eats and watches me with quick, black eyes. There is nothing really there, nothing for me beyond a memory of skin.

  “What did you do without me? What did you do?”

  He drifts slightly, drinks, then faces me and stands in the water, stretches himself in a broad white reach, the open feathers glimmering, dragging a howl from the air. He balances on his reflection, beats and beats, and I think that I see something: a mixture of dark and pink, like the touch of an ulcer, a long sore in the root of one wing: but then he is down again and folded and sculling away and I could have been mistaken, that might have happened quite easily.

  I call to him and have more bread, but he slips into reeds at the far bank, clambers up and makes his heavy-footed way off to the bushes, puts himself out of my sight.

  I worry for him.

  And in the evening, I tell somebody he’s hurt. I’m almost certain I actually do that. Nurse Forbes, or Nurse Ogilvie, I let one of them know, only I have the impression they are preoccupied, discussing a stunning recovery—two weeks from delirium tremens to normal life. They have never seen the like. They say this has happened to a man called Doheny and I am not surprised. I’m also unsure if they’ll remember about the swan.

  But I don’t fuss. I can write them a note, or speak to them tomorrow. So I just head over to Thoreau House and my old room, open-windowed and thick with sunset birdsong: squeaks and chips and chirring from every side and one long, roping melody above them which someone has told me belongs to a cardinal.

  You can’t have a wrong thought, listening to this. Sitting in the barley with Simon, my head was always orderly and bright—full of the birds we couldn’t name that carved out notes and spaces, that tickled and soared, and poppies more red than a colour, like the marks of somewhere else, some unnatural place, shimmering, and the height of the stalks there to hide us, because we were small. Then I was clean.

  Now I am no one, which is not the same thing.

  I sit on the floor, head braced against the bed and the shudder starts up in my back again and both my hands are wet.

  And Robert should have been here and I should have been able to find him and tonight we should be together and alive. And we should be each other’s mercy, each other’s gift, each other’s love. And I should be Hannah Luckraft and that should be a joy.

  XIV

  And for a while, maybe a long while, I do not move or see: I only listen to my room and the birdsong that fades to nowhere and leaves only my alarm clock, my heart, a sudden drag of thunder overhead, like the sound of a broad stone, being rolled away.

  I press my skull back hard and feel the side of the mattress changing where I touch it, a knitting and unknitting of springs. Delicate beneath me, lifting my legs by a degree, I understand there is a rise and spread of carpet that displaces the polished wood floor. The tiny disturbance of its arrival, an insect noise, ripples out to meet each wall and fits. I keep my eyes closed and listen to the budding of a desk, a chair, two lamps, two Formica bedside tables, a room key with an ugly fob, the slight creaks at the birth of an ashtray, a minibar fridge, a portable TV. And the taste of this room is stale cigarette smoke, air freshener, bleach, sweat and there is no garden alive outside it, not for miles.

  Softly, I glance to the window and there is an English night, a scatter of indecipherable beacons, illuminated buildings and a radar dish, spooning round, cupping through shadows. Marked out with little spills of light, the wide, grey belly of an aircraft grinds up across the dark, recedes into a pattern of red and white and green.

  I stand, because all this is solid now, possible and fixed, and I see that my holdall is fat and happy and the bed freshly made.

  Behind me, in the bathroom, I hear the small metal glide as the shower curtain closes, then a chatter of water, the comfortable jumble of noises when somebody starts to wash.

  I smile.

  I reach into my holdall and find the full bottle of Bushmill’s undisturbed: that marvellous label: the long, slim door that leads to somewhere else. When Robert has finished, when he steps through, pink with scrubbing, wrapped snug in a towel, then we’ll lie on the bed together and we’ll talk, we’ll tell each other everything. I’ll ask him to bring through the glasses and then we’ll begin.

  A. L. Kennedy

  Paradise

  A. L. Kennedy lives in Glasgow. She has received many prizes for her work, including the Somerset Maugham Award, the Encore Award, and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award.

  ALSO BY A. L. KENNEDY

  Fiction

  Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains

  Looking for the Possible Dance

  Now That You’re Back

  Original Bliss

  So I Am Glad

  Everything You Need

  Indelible Acts

  Nonfiction

  The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

  On Bullfighting

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 2006

  Copyright © 2004 by A. L. Kennedy

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events, locales, or actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Kennedy, A. L.

  Paradise / by A. L. Kennedy. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Drinking of alcoholic beverages—Fiction. 2. Women alcoholics—Fiction.

  3. Alcoholics—Fiction. 4. Scotland—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR606I.E5952p37 2005

  823’.914—dc22 2004048632

  www.vintagebooks.com

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42721-2

  v3.0

 

 

 
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