The night I received her email, I slept with V in my arms. It sounds like a strange thing to say because I knew she wasn’t physically there with me, but in all the important ways she was right by my side. It was as if her very essence was in our bed; I smelt her musky scent, felt her hair tickle underneath my chin, fitted my body against hers, held her breasts in my hands.
I woke the next day feeling totally refreshed for the first time in months and when I looked in the mirror after my run my cheeks looked fuller and flushed. Even Kaitlyn commented on how well I looked when I got into work and asked if V and I had made up. Nearly, I told her, with a wink.
Elaine called me during the day and I didn’t have a moment to return her call until I was walking home from the Tube station that evening. I had decided to give V a day to settle back in and then pick her up on Tuesday evening. I had googled restaurants near to her work and decided on a good Lebanese one a short walk from her office.
‘Oh hello, Mike,’ Elaine said when she picked up. ‘Thanks for calling back.’ I imagined her in the hallway, patting her hair as she spoke.
‘How are you?’ I asked, my mood so buoyant I wanted to share it with her.
‘I’m good. I was ringing to see how you are.’
‘I’m great. Everything’s really good.’
‘You certainly sound happy,’ she said, but her voice was tentative. ‘I haven’t spoken to you since Verity’s wedding. How did that go?’
I felt slightly irritated that she should bring that up. I was probably only a few weeks away from announcing our engagement and I didn’t need this reminder. ‘It was fine. A bit over the top, but you know Suzi.’
She hesitated. ‘Actually, Mike, Verity rang last night.’
‘What?’ It felt like a stone had dropped through my stomach.
‘She’s worried about you. So am I, in fact.’
I tried to laugh but it sounded hollow even to myself. ‘What do you mean?’
‘She told me about the emails.’
I stopped on the road and took a breath into my stomach. A man and woman were having an argument in a lighted window, the woman gesticulating wildly at him. ‘They were nothing. We’ve spoken since.’
‘Have you?’ Elaine’s voice rose hopefully.
‘Yes. It was stupid of me. The whole wedding threw me off balance, but Verity explained it all to me and I understand now. I was wrong to be angry with her.’ I started walking again.
‘But Verity said you wrote that you still love her.’
‘It’s all a lot of fuss over nothing.’ I turned up my path and opened my door, balancing the phone between my ear and my shoulder. The house was dark and cool.
‘I don’t want you to get hurt, Mike.’
I leant against the shut door, feeling suddenly weary. ‘Verity would never hurt me.’
‘Not intentionally, no.’ Elaine’s breathing had quickened. ‘Have you thought any more about seeing someone?’
‘No.’
‘I think it would do you good. So does Verity.’
There was a clear line of sight through to the garden from where I was standing and even in the dusk I could see something was wrong, which made my heart quicken. I walked forward purposefully, but then slackened my pace as I remembered that Anna had started that day.
‘I’m fine, really.’ I unlocked the bifold doors, so they could glide away.
‘Yes, but sometimes people don’t realise they need help until they get it.’ Elaine and I had had this conversation a hundred times before when I’d lived with her.
‘That’s my point about Verity.’ I walked into the garden. Anna’s team had begun to hack away at the stone structure of the garden so it resembled a Greek ruin.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know she’s pretty highly strung. I think she might be having one of her episodes.’
‘Really? She sounded fine to me.’
I picked up a bit of the chipped stone. ‘I know her so well, Elaine. I can tell she’s in a bit of a state.’
‘Oh dear. You two have always been so volatile. I just want you both to be happy.’
‘Well, I’m fine, and I plan to help Verity as much as I can.’
‘We all care about you, Mike. You know you can come and stay anytime.’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said, feeling a sudden surge of love for her. ‘And you and Barry must come here for supper or something.’
‘Well, that would be lovely.’
‘I’d better go now. I’ll call again soon.’
‘Bye, Mike.’ The hope had vanished from her voice and now it was dripping with melancholy.
Others might have been depressed by that call, but V and I are not like others. V would have known Elaine would call and it was just another move in our Crave, which I felt coming closer and closer to its climax. We had played enough times to know that the end moments often seem cruel; that for us to achieve our desires others have to get hurt. If we could have done it another way then no doubt we would have, but there was no other way; cruelty was a necessary part of our game.
They say that hate is the closest emotion to love. And passion certainly exists in two forms. The passion of sex and the passion of arguments. For V and I one would merge into the other all the time. One second shouting, the next fucking. We needed each other in a way that sometimes made me feel it wouldn’t be enough until we’d consumed each other. I read a story once about a Russian man who ate his lovers and I sort of understand why he did it. Imagine your lover actually travelling through your blood, feeding your muscles, informing your brain. Some would see that as the basest level of cruelty, others as an act of love. Ultimately, that is what to Crave means.
I sat in the bar opposite Calthorpe’s the next evening, waiting for V to emerge. The day had been bad and I drank Scotch as a way of eradicating it, although it refused to leave my mind. The chairman and I had had a meeting with the MD of Spectre in which he had cried and told us about the lives of some of the people losing their jobs. The chairman had looked at me and I’d known he wanted me to answer, to spout our well-rehearsed PR spiel. But something about seeing a grown man crying over the curved maple desk in the meeting room had repulsed me.
I heard words come out of my mouth even as I felt the chairman’s stare willing me to stop. The man stopped crying, staring at me open-mouthed. You’re not even an animal, he said, getting up and leaving. We sat in silence for a while after he had gone, my heart thudding in my ears. In the end the chairman stood up and sucked in his breath. I’m going to make an appointment for you with the company doctor, he said, before leaving.
I had forgotten that other people do not necessarily live in a world of bad words.
One of Mum’s boyfriends, I think his name was Logan, used to put his face very close to mine when he shouted. So close I had to screw my mouth shut against his spittle, You useless fucking cunt, he’d scream at me for knocking over his beer, or You fucking pansy twat, for sneezing when the football was on, or You cheeky fucking gobshite, for when I pretended not to hear him. My mother looked out of the window when he spoke, her neat profile blurred by the skyline, as if she couldn’t hear. Naturally he spoke to her in the same way and we both tiptoed round him as if we were visitors in his life and not he in ours. He wasn’t one of the thwackers though; Logan was cleverer than that, his violence more insidious. Logan knew that the threat of his temper hung like a cloud of poisonous fumes over the flat and that it was enough to exterminate the life we knew.
I don’t know why Logan left. I don’t know why any of the men left. All I do know is that they left my mum in ever-worsening states, which always seemed bizarre to me. Most people would celebrate their passing, but my mother clearly didn’t feel she ever deserved anything more than the lowest form of existence. I would watch her snivel on the sofa after another Logan exited our lives, a full ashtray balanced on her legs, beer cans littered by her feet, her eyes losing their focus, and I would want to jump up and down in front of her. I am h
ere, I used to want to shout, but I’m not sure she’d have noticed me even then.
You are not like her, V said to me time and time again, when the fear used to overtake me. But I was never honest with my reply. Because, before V, I was like my mother. I didn’t care, I found it easy to shut down, I turned away and found it too easy to be cruel to others. I think the truth is that V made me a better person and without her I could easily slip into the person my mother became.
V taught me not just what it felt like to really care about someone else, but also what it felt like to care about myself. She didn’t just sculpt my body, but my mind as well. When we met I ate crap and got out of breath walking up the stairs. I was skinny as a whippet and my unwashed hair hung long over my ears. I only asked her once why she had spoken to me at the party. I was too scared to jolt her into the realisation that she had been mad to do so. We were in bed at the time, her head on my chest, which had already started to change shape and fill.
‘Your eyes,’ she said, her hand resting on my lower belly. ‘I genuinely did just want a light, but when I looked at you to say thanks, you looked so lost, so vulnerable, I couldn’t just walk away.’
‘But why did you agree to go on a date?’ I asked into the blackness surrounding us.
‘Because I liked you by then. I could see your potential.’
V wasn’t my first girlfriend, but she was the first one who meant anything to me. And when I say anything, I mean that word literally. Before V I couldn’t understand anything about women and how they worked. I had no idea what they meant when they spoke, no desire to see them after we’d had sex, no comprehension of why they sometimes got angry and cried. It was like my heart hadn’t been used before I met V, like I’d never really noticed it or felt it beat. I mean, I know I care for Elaine and Barry, and I must have loved my mum at some point, but when I think about them it doesn’t feel like a real connection. When I think about V it is like there is a thread reaching from my heart to hers, tautening and relaxing with both our breaths.
I could look at V when she came in from wherever she’d been and know instantly how she was feeling. Every time she rang I knew it was her without looking at the screen. When we watched a film or listened to music I knew what her reaction would be without speaking. I knew how to make her scream and moan and thrash, every inch of her body mapped indelibly on my mind. Connections like that cannot be broken, however much they are separated.
I was unsteady on my feet when I finally gave up on seeing V that evening and left the bar. I stumbled on the pavement and had to lean against a wall to right myself. My head felt dislocated and nothing seemed real. People walked past me into the night and I forgot where I was going or where I had been. Nausea rose upwards and into my throat, squeezing my heart and constricting my breathing.
The next day at work felt like torture, a steady stream of needles driving into my skull, my body hot and shaky. I hadn’t run in the morning and I didn’t go to the gym at lunchtime, instead eating a bowl of pasta at a cheap restaurant filled with tourists round the corner. The food landed on the acid of my stomach making me want to retch, but I forced it down and then drank two strong coffees.
During the afternoon the company doctor rang and said he had an appointment for the next day at 3 p.m. and I was too befuddled to think of an excuse. I laid my head on my arms on my desk and looked sideways out of the window at the birds riding the wind currents outside. I’ve always known that if I had to kill myself it would be by jumping from a great height because that way you would at least have a few seconds of knowing what it felt like to fly.
George put his head round my door just after six, when the thought of the Tube was defeating me. I had already decided not to go to meet V that evening as I didn’t want her to see me in the state I was in. ‘A few of the chaps are going to this club,’ he said, with a wink. ‘Wondered if you’d like to join.’
‘A club, at this time?’ I said, my brain beating against the side of my head.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I’ve got a really bad headache.’
He came into the room, closing the door behind him, and walked towards my desk. He put his hand in his pocket and held out two red pills on the palm of his hand. ‘These’ll perk you up.’
The pills were no larger than the head of two pins fused together and the thought of anything making me feel better was too delicious to refuse. I reached for them and swallowed them in a gulp.
‘Good lad,’ he said, laughing. ‘Come on then.’
There were five of us, all walking purposefully through the old streets of the City into the East End, an area at once totally and not at all changed. I have always thought that the history of the East End is still written in the buildings and streets. The air hangs heavy with death and poverty and sex, however many grey coffee shops you plant along its highways.
We turned down a cobbled street with the houses so close together I could imagine people passing things to each other from high-up windows, or washing lines stretched between rooms, or mothers shouting for dirty children far below. My mind felt loose and my internal organs fluid in my body, as if suspended in liquid.
George knocked on a black door, which was opened by a man who was almost as wide as the door, his nose smashed across his face, his head shaved, his eyes wild. But he smiled incongruously and opened the door wider, ushering us inside. All the other men had clearly been there before and they peeled off up and down dark stairways and into dimly lit rooms. George beckoned for me to follow him, up a narrow flight of stairs towards a thumping beat which seemed to be part of the stone and plaster of the house. We climbed ever higher and the beat turned into music, which rested in my stomach like something primal. At the last door George turned and winked at me again before opening it and releasing the heat and stench of the place into my face. It took me a while to figure out the space, which was surely much larger than the house allowed, but when I did I thought it was fantastical. It was clearly the top floors of most, if not all, the houses along this street, an endless stretch of cavorting degradation.
The space had been sectioned into hundreds of booths and the walls were all mirrored, so it was impossible to tell what was real and what was simply a reflection. The air hung heavy with smoke and the musty, salty stink of semen. The carpet underneath our feet was sticky and the backs of the chairs looked greasy and grimy. The lights were off, apart from ill-placed spots which stabbed the air, blinding you if you looked too closely. Only the music felt natural, as if it had become part of me, lifting and guiding me towards something I could almost remember.
George pulled me forward and I realised as we got closer that we were heading towards a round stage on which twenty women, maybe more, writhed. Their bodies glistened like plastic, their feet distorted by the sort of heels even Kaitlyn would draw the line at. Some were completely naked, but most were wearing a sparkling V over their vaginas, with a corresponding line cutting through their buttocks, like an electric sign announcing their wares. They danced as though they were in a trance, dropping often to the floor and opening their legs, licking their lips and closing their eyes, their hands never far from their breasts.
There were lots of men just like us standing round the stage, some not even looking at the girls, but instead at their phones which illuminated their faces and made them look dead. One or two men were cheering, reaching out to grab at passing legs and breasts, saliva dripping from their mouths. Every so often a man would step forward and motion to a girl, usually by a click of his fingers or a well-directed point and the girl would stop her dance and step unsteadily off the stage, following the man to one of the rounded booths.
‘Which do you want?’ George asked, his voice hot in my ears.
I turned to look at him and I could see his face was puce even in the dark. I almost expected his hand to clench round his dick as we stood there. The air was close and heavy and I thought the floor might be tilting. I shook my head. ‘No. I have a girlfriend.’
He laughed, exposing his perfect white teeth. ‘Don’t be a poof. I’ve got a wife and two kids.’ The floor was undulating now, as if an earthquake was shaking the building and I could feel bile rise up into my mouth.
He leant closer to me, so I could hear every word he said. ‘You don’t have to worry about them.’ He jerked his finger at the stage of women. ‘They all love it. Sex mad, they are. Not like normal women. They’re like some sort of witches or something.’
I tried to take a step back, but another man was pressed close up behind me. I could imagine George at boarding school, masturbating an older boy, drenched in fear and loathing. I looked back at the women. ‘I have to go.’
But George took my arm. ‘Don’t be an idiot.’ His voice was harsh. He clicked his fingers at two women standing next to each other. ‘Mine’s the blonde,’ he said as they teetered off the stage.
The woman assigned to me took my hand and led me to a booth, where she ducked under the curtain, pulling me with her. There was a fake leather seat which took up half the booth, and she pushed me on to it. I felt my buttocks slide on the fabric and wondered whether, if a fire broke out, anyone would get out alive.
She stood in front of me, her hand on a hip, so she jutted out at an unnatural angle. Her shoes were as high as all the others and her sparkling V was a bright pink. Her hair was jet black and fell in greasy waves around her face. Her make-up was smudged and she stank of sweat and coconut.
‘We get champagne.’ Her voice was heavily laden with an accent I took to be Eastern European.
Our Kind of Cruelty Page 12